Image and Video Processing
A Systematic Survey on Event Camera Representation Learning
Hongwei Ren, Youxin Jiang, Tuopusen Huang et al. (+5 more)
Event cameras offer distinctive advantages, including microsecond-level latency and high dynamic range, rendering them promising for challenging perception tasks. Inspired by biological
vision, they output asynchronous and sparse event streams rather than dense image frames, creating a fundamental mismatch with mainstream neural networks. This survey reviews recent advances in event camera representation learning from the perspective of converting raw event streams into learnable representations. We first organize existing methods according to whether they rely on a single principal event representation or jointly exploit multiple complementary representations. Single-representation methods are further categorized into dense-based representations, which regularize events into structured grid-like forms, and sparse-based representations, which preserve event-native discrete spatio-temporal structures. Multi-representation methods are organized into dense-dense and dense-sparse hybrid formulations that exploit complementary representation properties. This representation-centric taxonomy clarifies how different paradigms balance structural regularity, temporal fidelity, sparsity preservation, and architectural compatibility. For each paradigm, we examine the underlying design choices, modeling principles, and task-level implications. We further summarize standard
benchmarks and evaluation settings across representative high-level perception and low-level
vision tasks. Finally, we discuss open problems and outline future directions from fixed representation design toward adaptive representation optimization, improved fidelity-efficiency trade-offs, and more scalable event-based perception systems.
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All authors Hongwei Ren, Youxin Jiang, Tuopusen Huang, Lei Yu, Xiao Wang, Min Liu, Lin Wang, Xiangqian Wu
Systems and Control
Non-intrusive nonlinear reduced-order modeling with variable projection
Dimitrios Xylogiannis, Charles Poussot-Vassal and Claire Sarrat
This work presents a method for constructing nonlinear reduced-order models from input-output time-domain data. The proposed approach, termed Mixed Interpolatory Inference with Variable Projection (MIIvp), exploits the fact that the considered class of nonlinear state-space models is linear in the output equation parameters. By applying the Variable Projection (VarPro)
algorithm, the optimization is restricted to the state equation parameters alone, while the output equation parameters are recovered via linear least squares. As a consequence, the output dimension does not enter the nonlinear optimization parameter vector, making the method well suited for systems with very high-dimensional outputs, a setting where many other approaches become computationally prohibitive. Under mild assumptions, it is shown that MIIvp can recover the true model parameters up to similarity. The method is first validated on a synthetic bilinear system, where it achieves machine-precision accuracy and recovers the true
eigenvalues. MIIvp is then compared with existing methods on two experimental
benchmarks from the nonlinear system identification literature. These numerical experiments showcase both the validity and the limitations of the proposed approach. Finally, directions for improvements and future work are outlined.
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Signal Processing
Integrating Sensing into Covert Communications: Opportunities and Challenges
Jun Wu, Xiaoqi Zhang, Haoyuan Pan et al. (+3 more)
Covert communications aim to hide the existence of wireless transmissions from unauthorized adversaries. However, conventional designs based on blind interference or passive uncertainty can be ineffective in dynamic propagation environments. This article investigates sensing-empowered covert communications, where adversary and environmental information are used to guide transmission and jamming control. We show how sensing changes covert system design from passive concealment to state-aware decision-making, while also introducing new challenges related to exposure and resource consumption. We further discuss several intelligent sensing paradigms that extract task-relevant information with limited active probing. A case study in low-altitude wireless networks illustrates that sensing-assisted beamforming can improve spatial resource utilization and the reliability of covert data delivery in time-varying channels. Finally, several open issues are discussed to support more adaptive covert wireless systems.
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All authors Jun Wu, Xiaoqi Zhang, Haoyuan Pan, Gaosheng Zhao, Dong In Kim, Tse-Tin Chan
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC
Towards time-variant scenario reduction for energy system optimization modeling under uncertainty
Yannick Werner, Juan Miguel Morales, Salvador Pineda et al. (+1 more)
Stochastic programming has become a popular tool for supporting decision-making under uncertainty in the long-term planning of energy systems. Existing scenario reduction methods, however, are naive about the long-term temporal nature of scenarios, which limits their efficiency in reducing model size. In this paper, we overcome this inefficiency by proposing a novel time-variant scenario reduction framework that explicitly allows for varying scenario aggregations over time. As a result, scenario probabilities become time-variant, enabling not only the accurate capture of scenario realizations but also their probabilities at the time steps that drive investment decisions. This substantially increases flexibility compared to traditional time-invariant methods, which we demonstrate on a two-stage
stochastic generation expansion planning problem with uncertain renewable power production.
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All authors Yannick Werner, Juan Miguel Morales, Salvador Pineda, Sonja Wogrin
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC
Estimating common synaptic inputs to spinal motor neurons from motor unit spike trains using openhdemg
Helio V. Cabral, Giacomo Valli, Roberto Zanotti et al. (+2 more)
Common synaptic input is considered a fundamental principle of motor
neuron control and represents the dominant component of the neural drive transmitted from the motor
neurons to muscle. Recent advances in High-Density surface Electromyography (HDsEMG) and motor unit (MU) decomposition
algorithms have enabled the concurrent identification of increasingly large populations of MUs and substantially expanded the possibility of estimating common synaptic input from MU spike trains, making this approach widely used to investigate the neural control of movement in humans. However, multiple analytical approaches are currently available, each relying on different physiological assumptions, mathematical formulations, and parameter choices. The lack of practical guidelines and open-source implementations has also limited the accessibility and reproducibility of these analyses. In this tutorial, we provide a practical, physiologically grounded guide to estimating common synaptic input from populations of MU spike trains using openhdemg, an open-source Python framework. We organize the available methods into three complementary categories: time-domain approaches applied to smoothed discharge rates, frequency-domain approaches based on coherence between cumulative spike trains, and a network-information approach based on nonlinear pairwise dependencies and graph theory. For each method, we describe its physiological interpretation, step-by-step estimation, and systematically examine how key parameter choices influence the resulting estimates, providing practical recommendations for their selection. Finally, we present a complete workflow from HDsEMG decomposition and MU cleaning to common synaptic input estimation, demonstrating that decomposition quality directly affects these estimates.
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All authors Helio V. Cabral, Giacomo Valli, Roberto Zanotti, Ioannis Delis, Francesco Negro
Audio and Speech Processing
STAR-VAE: Structured Topology-Aware Regularization for Audio Reconstruction and Generation
Huadai Liu, Wen Wang, Kaicheng Luo et al. (+3 more)
Continuous Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) serve as the fundamental continuous tokenizer for modern neural audio generation systems, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction while providing a compact, smooth latent space for downstream generative priors. However, continuous VAEs face a fundamental conflict among compression rate, reconstruction fidelity, and latent space
topology, which we formalize as the Rate-Distortion-Regularity Trilemma. This trilemma stems from a topological mismatch: the isotropic Gaussian prior in standard VAEs imposes a flat latent geometry that fails to accommodate audio's hierarchical nature, where low-frequency components are structured and compressible while high-frequency components are
stochastic and incompressible, leading to disordered information packing in which crucial semantic features are interleaved with high-
entropy noise. To address this challenge, we propose Structured
Topology-Aware Regularization (
STAR), a general training strategy that reshapes latent space geometry by imposing a growth-based constraint field, routing structural and textural information into channel subspaces with matching capacities.
STAR is applicable to any VAE architecture and effectively resolves the trilemma, as demonstrated in CNN-based VAEs. We further present
STAR-VAE, which combines
STAR with a hybrid CNN-Mamba architecture for local feature extraction and linear-complexity global context modeling, and
STAR-Gen, an LLM-based Flow Matching framework that leverages
STAR-VAE's structured latent space for high-fidelity generation without vector quantization artifacts. Experiments across diverse audio domains show that
STAR-VAE achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity and enhanced semantic information preservation, while the structured latent space improves both traditional
diffusion models and
STAR-Gen for text-to-audio generation.
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All authors Huadai Liu, Wen Wang, Kaicheng Luo, Qian Chen, Xiangang Li, Wei Xue
Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD
From Text Metrics to Model Internals: A Study of Whisper ASR Hallucination Detection
Jan Jasiński, Mateusz Barański, Julitta Bartolewska et al. (+2 more)
Hallucinations of ASR models - fluent transcriptions with no basis in audio - degrade system performance and pose risks in downstream applications. Robust detection of such errors remains a challenge. This paper studies Whisper large v3
hallucination detection on real-
speech human-annotated data across three paradigms: text-based, LLM-based, and internal decoder state probing. Text classifiers utilizing metrics for text evaluation achieve high recall but degrade without reference transcripts. LLM-based detection improves precision with domain-specific
prompt conditioning, yet remains less competitive than the lightweight text-based methods. Probing Whisper's decoder representations, without a ground-truth reference, yields the strongest performance, revealing that
hallucination traits are encoded across intermediate decoding layers. A late-fusion meta-classifier combining text and internal-state outputs achieves the best overall detection performance.
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All authors Jan Jasiński, Mateusz Barański, Julitta Bartolewska, Marcin Witkowski, Konrad Kowalczyk
Audio and Speech Processing
CAAD: Contrastive Audio-Aware Distillation for Efficient Speech Language Models
Chun-Wei Chen, Tzu-Quan Lin, Ke-Han Lu et al. (+2 more)
Speech Language Models achieve
reasoning capabilities, but are often hindered by massive parameter counts and a tendency to prioritize linguistic priors over acoustic features. While contrastive decoding enhances grounding by contrasting audio-aware and text-only logits, it increases inference latency. We propose Contrastive Audio-Aware
Distillation (CAAD), a framework that internalizes the teacher's contrastive
reasoning into the student model's weights. To overcome the high computational training overhead in the dual-path
token-by-
token contrastive
distillation process, we introduce a synchronized teacher-forcing strategy. Anchored by unified Pseudo-Ground Truths, this mechanism enables simultaneous full-sequence generation of the teacher's contrastive distributions, allowing student to distill the audio-aware signal efficiently. Overall, CAAD yields a ~8% relative gain over standard knowledge
distillation on Dynamic-SUPERB and successfully reduces linguistic bias in MCR-BENCH.
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All authors Chun-Wei Chen, Tzu-Quan Lin, Ke-Han Lu, Wei-Ping Huang, Hung-Yi Lee
Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD
HALAS: A Human-Annotated Dataset of Hallucinations of Modern ASR Systems
Mateusz Barański, Jan Jasiński, Julitta Bartolewska et al. (+2 more)
End-to-end Automatic
Speech Recognition (ASR) systems hallucinate on natural
speech, yet existing mitigation methods are typically evaluated on non-
speech or artificially corrupted audio. We introduce HALAS, the first human-annotated
dataset of naturally occurring
hallucinations from seven state-of-the-art ASR models on real unprocessed earnings call recordings. HALAS provides span-level labels, enabling analysis of
hallucination patterns and their severity. Our analysis reveals strong cross-model vocabulary overlap and confirms that
hallucinations also occur for almost correctly transcribed
speech (characterized by a low Word Error Rate). The proposed
benchmark with HALAS shows that the character and semantic-level metrics used as a proxy for
hallucination detection reach 81% ROC-AUC, while state-of-the-art detection methods achieve an F1 score of only 53.1%. As such, HALAS establishes the first rigorous non-artificial
benchmark for the detection and mitigation of ASR
hallucinations.
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All authors Mateusz Barański, Jan Jasiński, Julitta Bartolewska, Marcin Witkowski, Konrad Kowalczyk
Systems and Control
Robust Data-Driven Nash Equilibrium Seeking under Partial-Decision Information
Linqi Wang, Yifei Li, Wenjie Liu et al. (+3 more)
This paper presents a data-driven framework for decentralized Nash
equilibrium (NE) seeking in multi-
agent systems with unknown linear dynamics subject to exogenous disturbances, operating under partial-decision information (where
agents lack direct access to the decisions of all others) and equality constraints. The proposed framework integrates an NE model, a distributed communication protocol, an internal model for disturbance rejection, and a data-driven stabilization strategy. By reformulating the problem as a cooperative output regulation problem, we synthesize controllers directly from noisy input-state data via semi-definite programs (SDPs), providing formal guarantees for closed-loop stability and asymptotic convergence to the NE. The approach is further extended to a class of nonlinear systems with constant disturbances by leveraging integral control and describing nonlinearities via quadratic constraints. Numerical simulations involving unmanned aerial vehicle networks and a rotary-wing aerial vehicle formation validate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed method.
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All authors Linqi Wang, Yifei Li, Wenjie Liu, Yuzhou Wei, Gang Wang, Lihua Xie
Systems and Control
Scalable Online Flight Trajectory Optimization via Sequential Quadratic Programming for Urban Air Mobility in Ultra Low-Altitude Airspace
Josue N. Rivera, Bohang Liang, Chen Lv et al. (+1 more)
As Urban Air Mobility (UAM) scales toward high-density operations, generating collision-free trajectories within complex 3D cityscapes is a critical safety requirement. This paper proposes a scalable Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) framework that integrates
geometric environmental constraints, operational limits, and vehicle dynamics within a single online trajectory optimization process. Rather than precomputing obstacle-free corridors ahead of time, our method encodes obstacle avoidance as live separating-hyperplane constraints regenerated at every solver iteration, so that dense urban geometry and full-DOF vehicle dynamics are resolved jointly and online as the reference and environment evolve. A variable-scale quadtree decomposition keeps computation bounded, enabling the framework to scale to city-wide environments while preserving real-time performance for high-speed flight. We validate the framework against conventional SQP, Iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator, and Differential Dynamic Programming across flights in five real-world urban centers, attaining 100% success and clearance rates on CPU-only hardware.
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All authors Josue N. Rivera, Bohang Liang, Chen Lv, James Wang
Audio and Speech Processing
Domain-incremental audio classification using domain-specific experts and prototype classifier
Jongyeon Park, Do-Hyeon Lim, Sang-won Park et al. (+4 more)
This technical report presents submission systems for Task 7(domain-incremental audio classification) of the DCASE 2026 Challenge. The main obstacle is that, the system is unable to access to past or future domain's data at once. We approached domain-incremental learning (DIL) as a frozen-feature replay problem. At each incremental stage, one or two compact experts are trained and then kept fixed; at the final stage, the penultimate features from all frozen experts are concatenated and used to train a lightweight per-class prototype classifier solely on cached features. This design prevents catastrophic forgetting by preserving each expert models at inference. To retain earlier-domain knowledge without storing raw audio, some experts were trained with DeepInversion-based generative replay. A cross-stage regression imputer was trained to fill the expert feature slots that did not yet exist at an ealier stage. We submit four fully DIL-compliant systems: three systems based on diverse frozen five-expert backbones and their cross-stack ensemble achieving 78.15% micro / 77.03% macro on the development set, outperforming every individual backbone on both evaluations.
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All authors Jongyeon Park, Do-Hyeon Lim, Sang-won Park, Hong Kook Kim, Kyungdeuk Ko, Hyeongcheol Geum, Jeong Eun Lim
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.AI
ThermoLLM: Thermodynamics-Aware HVAC Control with Spatial-Semantic Knowledge Graph
Kirtan Bhatt, Xiachong Lin, Matthew Amos et al. (+2 more)
Multi-zone HVAC control is a spatial decision problem in which indoor thermal
evolution and control decisions depend not only on outdoor conditions and internal heat gains but also on zone layout, physical adjacency, and delayed thermal interactions across the building. Recent LLM-based HVAC controllers have shown that
prompt-based control is feasible. However, these methods typically rely on task descriptions, observation values, short textual feedback, or unstructured
retrieval, which limits their ability to reason about zone coupling, thermal response, and building dynamics. This paper presents a thermodynamics-aware LLM control framework for a five-zone EnergyPlus building simulation. The controller is grounded in a physics-informed spatial knowledge graph derived from Brick-style building semantics and linked with recent interaction history. At each control step, the model receives the current building state, graph-structured spatial context, and recent environment-controller history, enabling it to make decisions that reflect both building structure and short-term thermal
evolution. We evaluate the framework against standard control baselines and several LLM-based alternatives. Results show that the proposed approach achieves the best overall energy-comfort trade-off and the lowest PMV violation while maintaining energy-efficient operation.
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All authors Kirtan Bhatt, Xiachong Lin, Matthew Amos, Flora D. Salim, Wen Hu
Audio and Speech Processing
Explainable AI in Speaker Recognition – Attention Map Visualisation and Evaluation
Yanze Xu, Mark D. Plumbley and Wenwu Wang
Explaining and understanding the decision-making process of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly those implemented by neural networks, falls within the field of explainable AI (XAI). Analogous to the human
attention mechanism, neural networks are assumed to possess their own
attention mechanisms that selectively process information during decision-making. This work proposes to study one XAI topic: analysing and visualising the
attention mechanisms of neural networks. Our experiments are performed on speaker recognition neural networks that are trained to identify speaker identity from a given utterance. Previous studies have widely used class activation map (CAM)-based methods to analyse and visualise the
attention mechanisms of neural networks. Each of these methods produces an
attention map for each network input, highlighting which input regions are selectively processed when the speaker recognition network makes decisions. However, the evaluation of
attention maps produced by these methods remains largely underexplored. This work systematically reviews an existing
attention map evaluation
algorithm, establishing key concepts and identifying its shortcomings. On the basis of this existing evaluation
algorithm, a new version is then proposed to address the identified shortcomings, called the Modified Randomised Input Sampling for Explanation - Evaluation
algorithm (Modified RISE-eval). Using Modified RISE-eval, we evaluate the
attention maps produced by two representative CAM-based methods, GradCAM and LayerCAM, applied to a certain speaker recognition network. The evaluation results demonstrate that GradCAM and LayerCAM each exhibit distinct advantages when applied under different experimental conditions in the speaker recognition task.
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Signal Processing
Radio Resource Allocation for Beam Hopping Scheduling in LEO Satellite Communications: A Spatio-Temporal Perspective
Hao Yuan, Lanyining Li, Jianghua Long et al. (+1 more)
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks face critical challenges in
radio resource allocation due to dynamic traffic demands and stringent interference constraints. Beam-hopping (BH) technology offers a promising solution by enabling dynamic beam resource allocation across spatial and temporal domains. In this paper, we propose a Tabu Search-based spatio-temporal BH resource allocation strategy for LEO satellite communication systems. Specifically, the BH scheduling problem is formulated to maximize user demand satisfaction under interference constraints. To solve this problem efficiently, the proposed Tabu Search framework integrates adaptive tabu tenure control, greedy-based initialization with interference-aware beam selection, and Simulated Annealing acceptance criteria. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves system throughput by 17.2% and user satisfaction by 11.7% compared with greedy-based BH strategies. These results indicate that the proposed approach provides a scalable and robust solution for dynamic resource allocation in interference-limited LEO satellite networks.
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All authors Hao Yuan, Lanyining Li, Jianghua Long, Xing Zhang
Systems and Control
Adaptive Joint Beamforming and Fluid Antenna System Design for 6G ISAC
Haoyu Quan, Junhui Zhao and Dongming Wang
Fixed-Position
Antennas (FPAs) are constrained by static physical
topologies and struggle to adapt to rapidly varying wireless environments. By dynamically reconfiguring the
antenna positions, Fluid
Antenna Systems (FASs) introduce additional spatial Degrees of Freedom (DoF) for wireless optimization. This paper investigates the joint optimization of Fluid
Antenna System (FAS)
topology reconfiguration and active beamforming for mobile Integrated Sensing and Communication (
ISAC) systems. To enable real-time decision making, an end-to-end optimization framework based on the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)
algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves an online inference latency of only 4 ms. Compared to the widely used alternating optimization, it improves communication performance by 42%. Moreover, it achieves performance comparable to the SCA-SDR
benchmark while requiring 57% fewer
antennas, demonstrating superior hardware efficiency.
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Image and Video Processing
IViT: A Novel Interpretable Visual Transformer for Skin Disease Detection
Haibiao Li, Di Lin, Xue Jiang et al. (+3 more)
The clinical diagnosis of skin diseases is susceptible to interference from inter-class similarity of skin lesions, and over-reliance on clinicians'experience easily leads to subjective bias. Although existing deep learning aided diagnosis methods achieve competitive accuracy, they suffer from the black-box opacity of
Vision Transformer (ViT) and poor adaptability to medical few-shot scenarios. Moreover, mainstream explainable
algorithms generally face the bottleneck of significant accuracy degradation when improving interpretability. This paper proposes an interpretable ViT (IViT) constrained by Quadratic Programming (QP). The introduced pre-trained transfer learning adapts to few-shot feature extraction. A discrete QP feature selection framework is constructed to screen generic and discriminative features consistent with clinical diagnostic logic. A multi-objective loss function is designed to reduce feature redundancy and optimize activation distribution while preserving classification performance. Experimental results on six standard skin disease
datasets show that IViT achieves an accuracy of 93.80%, only 0.21% lower than the baseline, with feature redundancy reduced by 29.5%. Its core activation regions are consistent with clinically concerned lesion areas. The proposed model balances accuracy and interpretability, providing a reliable solution for the clinical deployment of few-shot intelligent skin disease diagnosis.
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All authors Haibiao Li, Di Lin, Xue Jiang, Weiwei Wu, Yanxi Li, Yugang Chi
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.RO
A Vendor-Agnostic LiDAR Data Conversion System with Multi-Signal Detection and Multi-Format Output
Param Patel, Jay Dave and Pratyush Chakraborty
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors capture the surrounding environment as dense 3D point clouds by measuring the time-of-flight of emitted
laser pulses, making them foundational across autonomous vehicles, robotics, and large-scale mapping. PCAP (Packet Capture) files from these sensors are the starting point of most 3D perception pipelines, yet internal packet structures, UDP (User Datagram Protocol) port conventions and encoding schemes differ enough across manufacturers that no single tool reads them all. Ouster, Velodyne, Hesai, and Livox each require their own SDK (Software Development Kit), their own environment setup, and their own conversion workflow. Supporting all four means maintaining four disconnected pipelines with no shared infrastructure. The pipeline described here takes a raw PCAP as input and handles vendor identification automatically, scoring six independent file characteristics through a weighted multi-signal approach to determine the source sensor. C++ SDKs handle Ouster and Velodyne, while Hesai and Livox rely on Python-based dpkt parsing where no open source SDK exists. From there, a single command writes output to any of five industry-standard formats. We tested on real outdoor captures. Ouster peaks at 2.08M points per second, Velodyne at 1.47M, both running through native C++ packet decoding. Hesai and Livox land at 110K and 150K respectively, where Python-layer parsing introduces overhead that compounds under sustained load. The 8-10x gap held consistently across runs. Tested on a consumer-grade i3 with 8GB RAM, no vendor configuration required
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Audio and Speech Processing
MSU-Bench: Towards Speaker-Centric Understanding in Conversational Multi-Speaker Scenarios
Zhaokai Sun, Shuai Wang, Zhennan Lin et al. (+6 more)
Spoken
Language Understanding (SLU) is moving from task-specific pipelines toward large audio
language models (LALMs) that generate natural-
language responses. However, existing
speech benchmarks mainly focus on single-speaker settings or isolated subtasks, leaving speaker-centric understanding in realistic multi-speaker conversations insufficiently evaluated. We introduce MSU-Bench, a diagnostic
benchmark for multi-speaker conversational understanding, covering 16 speaker-centric tasks and 2,300 QA instances in a two-tier framework from speaker grounding to dialogue
reasoning. We build a Gemini-assisted annotation and QA generation pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, achieving high QA validity and strong agreement between human answers and verified labels. We further analyze speaker-referencing schemes and diagnostic error types to reveal bottlenecks in speaker grounding and
reasoning. Experiments reveal clear gaps across model families, with closed-source systems leading overall but all models still facing challenges in complex speaker grounding and multi-speaker
reasoning. The
benchmark annotations, metadata, and evaluation scripts will be available at the GitHub repository: https://github.com/ASLP-lab/MSU-Bench.
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All authors Zhaokai Sun, Shuai Wang, Zhennan Lin, Chengyou Wang, Dehui Gao, Yuang Cao, Chunjiang He, Pan Zhou, Lei Xie
Systems and Control
Delayed Functional Observers for the Realization of Generalized Delayed Control Laws
Hieu Trinh
Building on the collective advancements in the literature \cite{trinh1, trinh2, trinhnn26, trinhnam26, trinhnam1}, this paper proposes the design of delayed functional observers to asymptotically estimate a generalized delayed control law under significant input and output delays. This framework enables designers to extend the allowable bounds for input delays while ensuring that the observer-based control scheme stabilizes the system despite simultaneous mismatched input and output time-delays.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
HERCULES: An Open-Source Simulation Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot SLAM, Collaborative Perception, and Exploration
Sandilya Sai Garimella, Daniel Chase Butterfield, Sean Wilson et al. (+1 more)
We present HERCULES, an open-source simulator and data-collection pipeline for heterogeneous multi-
robot autonomy. Built upon the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5)-based simulators AirSim and Cosys-AirSim, HERCULES resolves key architectural limitations of prior frameworks to enable concurrent unmanned aerial and ground vehicle (
UAV-UGV) operation in large-scale, photorealistic, dynamic environments. It introduces a new waypoint-tracking UGV controller that mirrors existing
UAV control interfaces, and provides a shared
navigation stack for mapping, traversability analysis, planning, and control across heterogeneous platforms. Expanding inherited sensor suites, it adds physics-based long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras and configurable night-
vision modes for degraded visual environments. HERCULES provides lightweight APIs, ROS 2 wrappers, and rigorous time synchronization across sensors and platforms, and brings state-of-the-art game-engine capabilities into robotics simulation, integrating intelligent
agents such as pedestrians, traffic, and wildlife with high-fidelity dynamic phenomena, including fire, flooding, and crop disease spread. HERCULES runs in two modes: passively, replaying offline-designed trajectories to generate reproducible multi-modal
datasets, and actively, running an online planner in closed loop from live observations. Our experiments in heterogeneous multi-
robot SLAM, collaborative perception, and exploration, using both HERCULES-generated data and active closed-loop execution, demonstrate its utility for advancing heterogeneous multi-
robot autonomy. We publicly release our source code, experiment code, documentation, and
datasets, including a heterogeneous multi-
robot SLAM
benchmark collected with two
UAVs and two UGVs across kilometer-scale desert, forest, and city environments, at https://lunarlab-gatech.github.io/HERCULES-website.
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All authors Sandilya Sai Garimella, Daniel Chase Butterfield, Sean Wilson, Lu Gan
Signal Processing
Low-Complexity Direct Geolocation of Terrestrial GNSS Jammers from Low Earth Orbit
Giacomo Pojani, Javier Tegedor and Joaquim Fortuny-Guasch
This paper introduces a low-complexity technique named quasi-direct geolocation (QDG) to perform passive
radio-frequency (RF) geolocation of emitters directly in the position domain, akin to direct geolocation (DG) and direct position determination (DPD). The proposed technique drastically reduces the complexity of DG/DPD and is experimentally demonstrated in geolocating a terrestrial jammer at Jammertest 2025 from a repurposed satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO): OPS-SAT PRETTY. The goal of QDG is to enable satellites to contribute to a multi-constellation system for RF interference (RFI) monitoring as opportunistic spectrum sensors in global
navigation satellite systems (GNSS) bands, even if these are constrained by low size, weight, and power (SWaP). They can serve as data collectors and/or edge computers. In the former case, QDG can be used to compress large volumes of I/Q samples into minimal signal information, which can be relayed to ground for post-processing via low-capacity downlinks. In the latter case, QDG can be used to compute the geolocation of RFI sources in orbit on low-power on-board computers (OBC). The drawback of these capabilities is lower sensitivity and accuracy than DG/DPD plus limitations on the types of signal sources that can be geolocated, which, nonetheless, include the most common GNSS jammers.
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Systems and Control
Development, Validation, and Benchmarking of a Multidisciplinary Semi-Analytical Model for Wave Energy Converters
Rebecca McCabe, Madison Dietrich and Maha Haji
Wave energy converters (WECs) require system-level techno-economic analysis to balance power production, cost, and survivability. Existing simulation tools are either too computationally costly for large-scale optimization or too narrow in disciplinary scope to support integrated design studies. This work presents MDOcean, a novel open-source WEC simulation framework for rapid early-stage design exploration, parametric analysis, and multidisciplinary optimization. MDOcean integrates hydrodynamics, dynamics, structures, and economics in a computationally efficient architecture based on analytical and semi-analytical methods that substantially reduce runtime while maintaining near-numerical accuracy. The framework includes an eigenfunction-based linear hydrodynamic solver, a quasi-linearized frequency-domain dynamics engine capable of modeling drag and saturation nonlinearities, a structural sizing module incorporating realistic yield, ultimate, buckling, storm, and fatigue design criteria, and a simple cost model for techno-economic assessment. Particular emphasis is placed on the linearized pseudo-spectral optimal control formulation, which extends frequency-domain constraint-handling approaches with a unified describing-function and analytical quadratically-constrained quadratic program framework. This formulation efficiently treats nonlinearities and constraints while preserving compatibility with optimization and frequency-domain analysis techniques. Validation and benchmarking demonstrate that MDOcean's 151 ms runtime is orders of magnitude faster than leading WEC simulation tools while maintaining agreement with higher-fidelity baselines to within a few percent in most cases. The framework also provides insight into limiting behaviors, scaling laws, subsystem interactions, and key tradeoffs governing WEC design and techno-economic performance.
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