Papers

We consider the problem of designing input signals for an unknown linear time-invariant system in such a way that the resulting data, within a finite horizon, is suitable for identification with a desired accuracy. We consider both noise-free and noisy settings with $\ell_\infty$–bounded noise models. We will take into account general prior knowledge of the system parameters. Central in our study is the concept of universal inputs. An input is called universal for identification if, when applied to any system complying with the prior knowledge, it yields data suitable for accurate identification. We provide new methods for designing such universal inputs. Our results generalize the experiment design approach based on Willems et al.'s fundamental lemma that relies on persistently exciting inputs, and that is limited to prior knowledge on controllability. It turns out that for other types of prior knowledge, there exist universal inputs that outperform the persistently exciting ones, e.g., in terms of sample efficiency. Moreover, we investigate types of prior knowledge that enable experiment design for exact identification in the presence of noise.

Rather than providing an exhaustive survey, this paper presents a concise tutorial on world models and world action models for robotics. After reading the tutorial, readers should have a clear understanding of what constitutes a "world", how world models and world action models are defined, and what roles they play within robotic AI systems. The tutorial also develops a unified perspective for comparing representative approaches, such as World Labs' spatial intelligence models, Yann LeCun's JEPA framework, and NVIDIA's Cosmos platform, and clarifies how these models differ in their representations, predictive capabilities, and interaction mechanisms.

For predictive models, the often-reported performance metrics are the loss and accuracy. In synchronous Brain- Computer Interface (BCI) systems, these metrics are informative for most BCI paradigms; however, for Event-Related Potential (ERP) applications the spelling rate, which measures the number of characters correctly selected is more important as it influences the estimation of information transfer rate (ITR) and any related metric measuring spelling performance. Moreover, ERP-based BCIs hold imbalanced data class distributions, which require reporting metrics that can handle the imbalance, such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC). In this work, we study the correlation of the spelling rate with 13 metrics to identify which among them best reflect user spelling performance and how they are affected by trial repetition. The Results of two datasets (a private LARESI ERP dataset and the public OpenBMI ERP dataset) favor the Brier score, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), and the metrics that account for class imbalance in binary classification: ROC AUC, area under the Precision-Recall curve (PR AUC), Average Precision (AP), and partial AUC (pAUC). These findings encourage researchers and practitioners to report those metrics in ERP-based BCI experiments.

This letter studies reduced-attitude tracking for a rigid body on the 2-sphere S2 under a time-varying conic constraint. Using a kinematic model on S2, we first propose a geometric tracking law that guarantees almostglobal asymptotic and regionally exponential convergence in the unconstrained case, where the angular velocity serves as the control input. We then introduce a smooth reference-shaping mechanism that adjusts the desired direction so that the reference provided to the controller satisfies the time-varying conic constraint while preserving the smoothness required by the tracking law. The resulting approach yields smooth continuous feedback and retains the stability guarantees of the unconstrained controller, albeit at the expense of enforcing a soft version of the original constraint. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the method and highlight its suitability for applications where deterministic behavior, smooth control action, and strong stability guarantees are preferred over hard constraint satisfaction.

This paper examines the use of radiofrequency (RF) channels for hemodynamic monitoring in cardiac pacemakers. It analyzes RF signal variations between intracardiac transceivers in the right ventricle (RV) and right atrium (RA), as well as subcutaneous receivers, to determine their correlation with cardiac dynamics. The study shows that temporal RF signal variations closely align with cardiac rhythm, allowing for the estimation of parameters such as chamber volume, valve behavior, and pressure changes. These results underscore the potential of RF-based sensing as a novel method for real-time cardiac monitoring in pacemaker systems.

Safe motion planning in dynamic environments requires reasoning about the uncertainty in predicted obstacle motion without sacrificing real-time performance. Existing conformal approaches conformalize a scalar score that aggregates per-obstacle prediction errors, losing spatial coherence and scaling poorly with scene density. We instead conformalize the entire predicted distance field at once. This functional conformal prediction (FCP) framework yields a distribution-free, field-level lower bound, from which safety follows uniformly: any trajectory satisfying the resulting constraint is certified safe, independent of how the control space is sampled. The key enabler is that the residual distance field is empirically low-rank and approximately time-invariant, which makes the bound decomposable in coefficient space. An envelope is fitted offline via functional PCA and a Gaussian-mixture inductive conformal procedure, then refined online by a lightweight adaptive functional conformal (AFCP) update on a low-dimensional vector. This keeps the per-step cost largely insensitive to obstacle count and retains long-run field coverage under distribution shift. We embed the envelope as a tightened safety constraint in a sampling-based model predictive controller, FCP-MPC. On the ETH–UCY pedestrian benchmarks and a dense 3D quadrotor task with up to 280 dynamic obstacles, FCP-MPC attains a favorable balance of safety, feasibility, and efficiency, reaching goals where pointwise and egocentric conformal baselines become too conservative or too expensive, while keeping per-step computation far below online uncertainty-reasoning baselines.

This paper develops a data-enabled primal-dual framework for learning optimal control policies for unknown linear discrete-time systems from online data. The proposed approach views the data-dependent control synthesis problem as a time-varying semidefinite program (SDP) whose coefficients are recursively updated from online closed-loop measurements. Instead of repeatedly solving a full SDP as new data arrive, the policy is updated online through lightweight primal-dual iterations, each consisting of a linear equation solve and a projection onto the positive semidefinite cone. The framework applies to both direct and indirect data-driven formulations and covers a broad class of control objectives, including LQR, $H_\infty$ control, and safety-critical control. To characterize the coupling between online optimization and closed-loop data generation, we introduce two data-dependent quantities: the Sim-to-Real Gap, which measures the mismatch between noisy and noiseless data-induced SDPs, and the Difference-of-Signal, which measures the temporal variation of the SDP coefficients. Under persistency of excitation, suitable SDP regularity conditions, and sufficiently slow data variation, we establish a local linear tracking result up to residual terms governed by the latter two quantities. A global ergodic convergence bound is also derived for arbitrary initialization. Numerical examples on LQR, $H_\infty$ control, and safe exploration demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently improve control performance from online data while accommodating SDP constraints beyond the well-explored LQR policy-gradient formulations.

This paper presents a learning-based control framework that integrates feedback linearization with reinforcement learning for the adaptive control of nonlinear mechatronic systems. The control law is derived using Lyapunov stability analysis, ensuring closed-loop stability in the presence of modeling uncertainties and external disturbances. Feedback linearization serves as the main control framework, while a reinforcement learning component estimates and compensates for unmodeled dynamics and disturbances online. The learning module is based on the REINFORCE-with-baseline algorithm, which improves learning efficiency by reducing the variance of policy-gradient estimates and enabling stable policy updates during adaptation. The proposed controller is evaluated on a single-degree-of-freedom rotor-based AERO system. Results from simulations demonstrate accurate trajectory tracking, fast adaptation, and strong robustness against parameter variations and external disturbances. Overall, the proposed approach combines the analytical guarantees of Lyapunov-based control with the adaptability of reinforcement learning, providing an effective solution for controlling nonlinear mechatronic systems.

This paper proposes an Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM)-empowered integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) design, referred to as AFDM-ISAC. We first design a novel AFDM-ISAC frame structure that consists of both ISAC and pure data symbols. Each ISAC symbol consists of a single chirp subcarrier for both sensing and channel estimation, while the remaining subcarriers are allocated for communication. Building upon this structure, we present an analog-domain sensing receiver that down-mixes the received echo with a local chirp to fully exploit chirp compression gains avoiding the need for full-duplex hardware. In addition, a sensing fusion algorithm, guided by AFDM modulation parameters, is further proposed in the digital domain. Leveraging the distinct features of the proposed AFDM-ISAC frame, we present a low-complexity channel estimation scheme for high mobility channels based on a generalized complex exponential basis expansion model (GCE-BEM), along with an optimal power allocation strategy between pilot and data symbols. Moreover, to support frame-based AFDM communications, a GCE-BEM-based Kalman filter is also employed for robust intra-frame channel estimation.

Zero-emission mobility depots are becoming resilience assets because one site can host EV charging, hydrogen-bus operation, stationary conversion equipment, and nearby critical-building backup. The key question is not raw outage export capacity: hydrogen exported to buildings can strand buses, EV availability is stochastic, and building demand shifts seasonally. We introduce a mobility-safe reserve certification framework for a coupled EV, hydrogen-bus, and critical-building hub. It combines a physics-hybrid universal differential equation building-load twin, one-sided split conformal reserve calibration, adaptive conformal inference for seasonal drift, and a mobility-first scheduling rule that protects post-event bus service before assigning hydrogen to buildings. Evaluation uses 495,221 real EV charging sessions across eight regions, AC Transit GTFS-derived hydrogen-bus service days, and EnergyPlus 25.2 simulations under real TMY3 weather. Across 66,816 held-out outage scenarios, a mobility-blind hydrogen-export policy served 39.2% of building demand but protected buses in 0% of cases and caused a 426.7 kg mean bus-hydrogen shortfall. A nominal mean-resource promise delivered only 45.4% of commitments. The certified mobility-first policy was the only tested policy to achieve 100% commitment delivery, 100% bus protection, and zero mean bus-hydrogen shortfall, while serving 20.5% of critical-building demand. Under a summer-to-winter load shift, adaptive conformal inference raised late-period empirical coverage from 0.687 to 0.831 and reached 0.891 overall coverage against a 0.90 target with lower mean reserve than static split conformal. Across 12 building/seed drift runs, it kept low late-coverage variability and the lowest mean reserve. These results show that resilience value in shared zero-emission hubs depends on service-aware certification, not raw export capacity alone.

Precision-agriculture networks based on private 5G NR should ensure reliable connectivity for IoT sensor nodes throughout the crop growing season, yet the propagation environment changes dramatically as vegetation grows and matures. We formulate $K$-base-station~(BS) placement as a maximin seasonal coverage problem that maximizes the worst-case coverage fraction across all crop growth stages. Since each objective evaluation requires expensive ray-tracing simulations across all stages, we adopt a Gaussian-process Bayesian optimization~(GPBO) framework that builds a probabilistic surrogate of the robust objective using ray tracing. On a $1\,\text{km}^2$ multi-crop farm with three distinct crop zones at $3.5\,\text{GHz}$, the proposed scheme achieves $72.8\%$ worst-case coverage with $K{=}3$ BSs in fewer than fifty ray-tracing evaluations, outperforming budget-matched state-of-the-art approaches by at least $4.6\,\text{pp}$ across all four seasonal stages.

Multichannel Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have significantly improved speech enhancement performance; however, they typically remain constrained by reliance on fixed microphone array geometries, leading to poor generalization on unseen or irregular configurations. Current array-agnostic approaches often rely on high-complexity architectures or massive, diverse datasets, yet they still struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution layouts. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of AmbiDrop, a recently proposed framework that achieves geometry independence by leveraging ideal Ambisonics as the DNN input. By employing a channel-wise dropout layer during training to simulate Ambisonics encoding errors, AmbiDrop decouples the learning process from the physical sensor arrangement. During inference, microphone signals from arbitrary array configurations are transformed into the Ambisonics domain via Ambisonics Signal Matching (ASM) before processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AmbiDrop maintains high robustness across a diverse suite of unseen simulated arrays and real-world recordings. Furthermore, our results show that the framework is resilient to sensor failures and remains effective even with reduced network scales, making it highly suitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and versatile wearable hardware.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have been recognized as a key component of future sixth-generation (6G) space-air-ground-sea integrated networks. Accurate characterization and modeling of air-to-ground (A2G) channels are essential for the design and optimization of low-altitude communication systems. This paper presents a wideband A2G channel measurement campaign in an urban environment at 2.85 and 4.6~GHz in FR1 and 7.25~GHz in the FR3 frequency band, each with a bandwidth of 250~MHz. To enable reliable line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation state identification, a weakly supervised method is developed by fusing geometric priors, channel features, and spatial consistency constraints. Furthermore, based on the measured data, A2G channel characteristics are extracted and analyzed under LoS/NLoS conditions across different frequency bands, including path loss (PL), shadow fading (SF), power delay profile, root-mean-square delay spread (RMS-DS), and Rician $K$-factor. The results show that the close-in model fits the measured PL more accurately than the 3GPP reference model, and that NLoS propagation leads to larger path loss exponents and stronger SF than LoS propagation. For channel delay characteristics, higher-frequency channels exhibit fewer effective MPCs and weaker delay dispersion, indicating increased channel sparsity. Specifically, the mean RMS-DS under LoS conditions decreases from 93.11 to 46.84~ns, while the mean Rician $K$-factor increases from 9.16 to 12.88~dB. The statistical results further show that the RMS-DS and the Rician $K$-factor can be well characterized by lognormal and normal distributions, respectively. Moreover, the movement of the receiver in a complex scattering environment intensifies the spatial non-stationarity of the A2G channel.

This article proposes the concept of brain-body-to-everything (B2X) networks to facilitate the integration of wireless networks and embodied intelligence. In this framework, the brain refers to the intelligence functions for reasoning, planning, and decision-making, the body denotes the physical embodied agent that senses and acts in the real world, and X represents the surrounding ecosystem involved in the brain-body interaction loop. Two B2X architectures with distributed and centralized brains are introduced to characterize different placements of intelligence across the body, base station, and core network. The uplink and downlink designs of B2X networks are then discussed under a representative base-station-side brain setting. For the uplink, communication is redesigned for B2X state acquisition under event urgency, sensing volume, and simultaneous multi-body access. For the downlink, communication is redesigned to coordinate command delivery and conventional service under shared radio resources. Based on these uplink and downlink considerations, a communication-control Pareto boundary is further used to characterize the loop-level trade-off between wireless transmission performance and control quality in B2X networks. Finally, several open research problems are discussed to guide future B2X network design.

We present STT-LfD, a unified Learning from Demonstration (LfD) framework that integrates motion learning with control for unknown Euler-Lagrange systems. Unlike traditional decoupled approaches that track a fixed reference, the proposed method treats demonstrations as a data-driven safety specification. Using heteroscedastic Gaussian Processes, STT-LfD learns Spatiotemporal Tubes (STTs) as an intent envelope that capture time-varying precision requirements of a task. A closed-form feedback controller then enforces these learned constraints while respecting actuator limits, without requiring explicit system identification. The approach preserves the temporal structure of demonstrations, remains computationally efficient, and avoids explicit system identification. Hardware experiments on a mobile robot and a 7-DOF manipulator show that it outperforms baselines in robustness to disturbances and computational speed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous, and across domains, increasingly autonomous systems are carrying out tasks which raise significant ethical and legal challenges which demonstrate a need for strong human-machine teams rooted in trust. In this article, I argue that within highly impactful areas (such as medicine or warfighting) there are grounds for us initially treating autonomous and opaque systems as relevantly analogous to dogs (or other animals with which we have close relationships). Under this analogy, humans making use of these systems are not to be viewed as "users" or "deployers" of these systems, but instead take the role of "handlers". This recasting of roles shifts the way we view humans, AI-enabled and autonomous systems, and the relations between them, and moreover clarifies the clear and traceable lines of responsibility humans have for the outcomes brought about when using these systems. In developing this point, I clarify that the machine-animal analogy does admit disanalogous elements, but that its touch-points ground it as a starting point. I then explore how we can divest the humans-as-handlers approach of those aspects of our relationships with animals which are unfitting for how we engage with and make use of autonomous and AI-enabled systems. I conclude by arguing that the trajectory of human-machine teamings for autonomous and AI-enabled systems should be a state where we authentically view these not as artifacts which we simply make use of, but as collaborators with which we pursue complex goals and carry out complex tasks.

Centralized hydrothermal planning models determine generation schedules and electricity spot prices based on inflow forecasts in audited-cost power systems, such as those prevalent in Latin America, and provide operational benchmarks and decision support in hydro-dominated competitive electricity markets. Consequently, biased forecasts can propagate directly into both operational decisions and market outcomes. This paper studies how persistent optimistic inflow-forecast bias propagates through the Brazilian hydrothermal power system and market. For a stylized hydrothermal model, we show analytically that optimistic bias weakly reduces water values and weakly increases first-stage hydro discharge relative to the unbiased optimum, thereby lowering reservoir storage and postponing thermal commitment. Using official Brazilian planning and operational data, we provide empirical evidence consistent with this mechanism. We then conduct a controlled SDDP experiment to compare policies trained under biased and bias-corrected inflow-forecast processes, evaluating both under the same bias-corrected inflow scenarios. The policy trained under biased forecasts produces lower reservoir levels, delayed dry-season thermal dispatch, sharper spot-price peaks, higher reliability risk, and higher expected operating costs. Finally, we show that these distortions increase the price-quantity risk for hydropower producers and reduce their willingness to contract. The results indicate that inflow-forecast bias is not merely a statistical forecasting problem, but can be a source of operational inefficiency, reliability risk, and distorted market incentives in hydro-dominated power systems. We argue that the insights and policy implications drawn in this paper may be relevant beyond Brazil to other hydro-dominated systems and electricity markets that are increasingly reliant on energy storage.

Redundant robotic manipulators operating in constrained and human-interactive environments require accurate task-space tracking together with rigorous safety guarantees under dynamic uncertainties. Classical operational space computed torque controller (OSCTC) relies on accurate dynamic models and degrades in the presence of disturbances. In contrast, the data-driven paradigm of residual learning approximates disturbances as functions learned from full-state measurements, which are often noisy in practice, lack rigorous theoretical guarantees, and introduce additional design complexity. This paper proposes a robust OSCTC framework that integrates an extended state observer (ESO) with conformal prediction to combine model-based robustness and data-driven adaptability. The ESO estimates lumped disturbances directly in operational space without requiring full-state measurements as in residual learning, and a robust control barrier function (CBF) is constructed to enforce safety under uncertainty. However, robust CBFs require a known disturbance-variation bound to guarantee absolute safety, which often leads to conservatism in practice. To address this limitation, we further employ a sliding-window conformal prediction mechanism to estimate the bound online in a distribution-free manner, thereby achieving practical probabilistic safety guarantees. Experiments on a 7-DoF Franka Research 3 manipulator demonstrate millimeter-level tracking accuracy and real-time safe control at 1~kHz under various disturbances.

Maintaining sinusoidal or near-sinusoidal operating conditions in electrical systems is essential, as is their accurate assessment. This letter proposes a novel metric, namely the sinusoidality index, which quantifies the instantaneous deviation of the trajectory of an ac voltage vector with respect to a circle under any periodic operating conditions. This metric differs from conventional Fourier-based estimations by accounting for the trajectory of the waveform rather than its spectral decomposition. A variety of examples illustrates the properties of the proposed metric and highlights insights that may not be captured by conventional approaches.

This paper presents Speech Playground, an interactive speech visualization and comparison tool. While existing tools such as Praat are excellent, it can be cumbersome to integrate them with modern deep learning representations and use them for comparison. Speech Playground addresses this by combining a Python backend with a web-based frontend for interactive exploration of multiple feature types, including continuous, discrete, and variable-length representations. It includes TextGrid and forced alignment support together with configurable distance and alignment settings for visual and auditory comparison. Speech Playground is intended for use in speech research, representation validation, and computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT)-oriented experimentation.

This paper presents a unified geometric, mathematical, and computational framework for the generation of the $complete$ admissible Pareto frontier. Several existing methods are structurally unable to capture the complete admissible Pareto frontier. These include widely used methods such as the weighted sum, the Normal Boundary Intersection (NBI) method, and the Normalized Normal Constraint (NNC) method. NNC and NBI, which share the same Pareto-generation grid construction, are structurally unable to capture 50% of the admissible Pareto region for tri-objective problems. More generally, for an $n$-objective problem, the admissible capture fraction decreases factorially as $1/(n-1)!$, and the corresponding missed fraction increases to $1-1/(n-1)!$. By contrast, the newly developed Generalized Normal Constraint (GNC) method introduced in the present work is structurally capable of capturing the complete admissible Pareto frontier. The proposed GNC method is formulated for general $n$-objective optimization problems and is developed through a unified geometric, mathematical, and computational framework supported by computational examples. Multiobjective optimization plays an important role in a broad range of applications, including economics, product design, and engineering management. Accordingly, the ability of a Pareto-generation method to generate a representative subset spanning the $complete$ admissible Pareto frontier is of fundamental importance for multiobjective optimization.

This paper examines audio self-supervised learning (SSL) through the alignment between pretraining objectives, architectural inductive biases, and downstream applications. Rather than treating SSL methods as a chronological sequence of pretext tasks or model families, we ask how different supervisory signals shape the representations that models are expected to learn. The discussion is organized around five paradigms: auxiliary tasks, contrastive learning, generative reconstruction, discrete token prediction, and multimodal alignment. These objectives place different demands on the model, from local structural sensitivity and contrastive invariance to contextual inference, discrete semantic abstraction, and multimodal grounding. We relate these demands to the biases of CNNs, recurrent and State Space Models, Transformers, and hybrid architectures, showing how local acoustic compression, sequential state propagation, content-dependent global routing, and local–global integration support different forms of audio SSL. The same view is then used to interpret downstream applications in speech processing, environmental sound analysis, music information retrieval, medical and bioacoustic analysis, and multimodal audio understanding as practical tests of whether learned representations and architectural choices generalize across domains. We also review benchmark protocols and open challenges, including tokenization bottlenecks, long-context efficiency, robustness, and secure multimodal deployment, and discuss how codec-based tokenization and audio-language modeling extend this objective–architecture–application pipeline. The accompanying repository is released at https://github.com/colaudiolab/Awesome-Self-Supervised-Audio-Learning.

Automated malaria diagnosis from blood smear microscopy is a critical global health AI challenge; expert scarcity remains the primary diagnostic bottleneck. Existing deep learning systems face three compounding failures: end-to-end detectors treat unannotated cells as background, skewing recall by annotation completeness rather than true cell recovery; Non-Maximum Suppression suppresses valid detections in dense smears; and pipelines lack per-cell spatial evidence for clinical audit. We present MalariAI, a two-stage decoupled framework addressing all three. Stage 1 applies an annotation-agnostic watershed algorithm to isolate every cell in a full 1600x1200 image, recovering 75.95% of ground-truth cells without any ground-truth input. End-to-end, the pipeline reaches a binary parasitized AP@0.5 of 29.10% - the clinically relevant metric for flagging any infected cell - while the stricter multi-class mAP@0.5 of 8.67% mainly reflects watershed's organic region boundaries being penalized against axis-aligned ground-truth boxes, not a localisation failure. Stage 2 fine-tunes EfficientNet-B0 with Focal Loss on ground-truth crops, achieving 98.36% classification accuracy - an oracle upper bound once a cell is correctly localised - with 87.5% and 75.0% accuracy on the rare schizont and gametocyte stages, versus 38.45% and 57.27% AP for a modern YOLOv8s detector evaluated end-to-end on the same classes. Grad-CAM++ heatmaps generated per detected cell provide instance-level spatial evidence for clinical audit; a quantitative energy-in-box analysis confirms this activation is concentrated on the annotated cell body significantly above a geometric chance baseline (+0.0485, paired p = 1.4 x 10^-33), letting microscopists verify predictions at the individual parasite level without sacrificing classification performance.

MRI guided adaptive radiotherapy (MRgART) for prostate cancer (PCa) targets tumors while sparing organs from unnecessary radiation. Daily treatment adaptation requires accurate segmentation of tumors and organs. Manual delineation can be time and cost prohibitive. Deep learning segmentation methods have limited success applied to datasets distinct from training, hampering generalizability and adoption of MRgART. We develop a novel parallel route coherent mixup (PaRC-mix) training approach for single source to multi-domain generalization. PaRC-mix creates feature augmentations at multiple network layers through linear combination of features from different training samples in a batch. PaRC-mix training was implemented on two deep and residually connected networks, a multiple resolution residual network (MRRN) and UNet++ to segment PCa dominant intraprostatic lesions from apparent diffusion coefficient images. Models were trained on 2,029 samples from 3.0T GE MRI and tested on 1,547 PCa samples from 5 datasets acquired using 3T Siemens, 3T Philips, and 1.5T Elekta Unity MR-Linac scanners. PaRC-mix training led to significantly more accurate tumor detection and segmentation for both networks compared to training without mixup as well as input-mix training. PaRC-mix also achieved better recall to precision tradeoff than mixup applied only on the network backbone or input-mixup. Using a normalized composite DSC, HD95, and MSD score the accuracy gap between aggressive and non-aggressive lesions decreased from 21.1 and 19.5 for MRRN and UNet++ models trained without mixup to 5.2 and 7.9 with same models trained with PaRC-mix. This paper presents an easy to implement network agnostic approach to feature augmentation in multi-stream networks that enhances generalizability for the difficult problem of prostate cancer lesion segmentation.

For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels with phase modulation, we recently proposed a method of unitarily transforming the channel matrix into a certain row-echelon form, by which the original MIMO channel can be converted into a certain number of scalar sub-channels with two phase inputs, thereby forming an annulus constellation geometry, and corrupted by both the additive white Gaussian noise and weak self-interference. In this paper, several bounds are derived to evaluate the fundamental limit of such a specific transceiver architecture. Two upper bounds are obtained by upper-bounding the capacity of a scalar channel with an annulus support constraint from the perspective of the convex geometry, while a lower bound is obtained by the standard entropy power inequality. Numerical results show that the gaps between these bounds are small at high signal-to-noise ratios for the MIMO phase-modulated channels over the Rayleigh fading and the single-input multiple-output symbiotic communication system assisted by a reconfigurable intelligent surface.

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and embodied intelligence (EI) enable autonomous agents to interact with the physical world. However, scaling these systems into networks of multiple agents, namely the Internet of EI (IoEI), faces critical bottlenecks. These include the overhead of massive multimodal data transmission and the decoupling of logical reasoning from physical constraints. To address these challenges, we envision the Semantic-based IoEI (SIoEI), which leverages semantic information as a unified metric throughout the agent lifecycle. We systematically define four key dimensions of EI: perception, intelligence, control, and communication. We further elaborate how semantic empowerment revolutionizes environmental perception, cognition and task planning, action generation and robust control, and communication and networking. We also present a case study to verify that, the semantic-empowered end-to-end process significantly improves channel robustness and reduces end-to-end latency for EI. Finally, we outline critical open research directions for the SIoEI paradigm.

This paper studies high-altitude platform (HAP)-assisted sparse cooperative integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) for UAV-enabled ocean monitoring. A fleet of rotary-wing UAVs senses drifting buoys, collects their monitoring data, and reports local posterior estimates to a HAP that performs fusion and sparse cooperation control. The model explicitly accounts for a spatially correlated sea-patch field, patch-aware buoy dynamics, RCS- and clutter-aware echo sensing, fused posterior Cramér-Rao bounds (PCRBs), and propulsion-energy-limited UAV mobility. The long-horizon objective is cast as a queue-weighted buffered-collection Markov decision process rather than instantaneous throughput, where each buoy maintains a backlog of buffered observations. The resulting long-horizon design is formulated as a mixed discrete-continuous problem with sensing, communication, mobility, safety, buffered-collection, and onboard-energy constraints. To address the combinatorial association component without replacing learning by a deterministic optimizer, we propose a structured feasible-association graph-MARL framework. A heterogeneous graph encoder produces candidate-edge logits, and a masked sequential b-matching policy samples legal UAV-buoy associations while exactly satisfying UAV-load and buoy-cluster constraints. A MAPPO-style training procedure, an independent queue-state value critic, and a consistency-verification protocol are then specified to support reproducible training. Simulation results on congested maritime scenarios show that the proposed policy improves the cumulative queue-weighted collection utility by about 106% over the rate-driven deterministic decoder, maintains a large margin across sea-state sweeps and medium-to-heavy traffic loads, and transfers to larger networks without fine-tuning.

Future engineering infrastructures are evolving into large-scale, open, heterogeneous, and wirelessly interconnected complex systems. These systems present significant challenges in optimizing network resource utilization, managing high-dimensional information spaces, and accommodating diverse business requirements. Intellicise networks, characterized by Intent-driven operation, semantic-native capability, and distributed intelligence, offer a promising paradigm for enabling such intelligent complex systems. We provide a systematic exploration of future intelligent complex systems from the perspective of intellicise networks. Specifically, we propose a cross-domain intelligent communication network architecture based on intellicise networks, grounded in information theory, systems theory, game theory, and cybernetics. The architecture comprises a cross-layer organizational framework, multi-functional planes, and novel information flows. The cross-layer framework defines the vertical evolution from perception and cognition to decision, while the control, user, data, computation, intelligence, and security planes deliver horizontal intellicise capabilities. Moreover, data, knowledge, model, and task flows interconnect the various layers and planes, forming a closed-loop process that derives simplicity from high-level intelligene while concurrently pursuing enhanced. Building on this architecture, we review key enabling technologies, tracing their evolution from semantic extraction to intent understanding, from heterogeneous resource integration to self-configuration and self-optimization, from generative artificial intelligence (AI) to agentic AI, and from embodied AI to symbodied AI. Additionally, we present a case study on intellicise networks for embodied agent communications and discuss representative applications and services for intelligent complex systems.

We present a real-time musical interface that converts natural-language scene descriptions into evolving procedural soundscapes. A performer types a prompt such as "warm jazz cafe at midnight" and steers it through direct parameter adjustments - stepping brightness down, switching a rhythm style - each producing a predictable, audible shift without re-prompting. Where GPU-bound text-to-audio systems synthesize monolithic waveforms, our instrument generates human-readable configurations over a categorical schema, enabling fine-grained performer control; most valid combinations are designed to sound musically coherent. Three interchangeable backends - embedding retrieval for sub-second CPU-only use, hosted LLMs via API, and a fine-tuned 270M local model - all emit the same schema. A live generator architecture continuously emits audio while resolving new instructions in the background, crossfading seamlessly when ready; even when an LLM takes 5-12 seconds to respond, the audience hears uninterrupted sound - reframing text-to-music as an ongoing performable stream rather than a one-shot generation. We evaluate text-audio semantic alignment using LAION-CLAP on held-out prompts as a technical proxy, finding that retrieval-based configuration outperforms random valid configurations on this metric, while noting that LAION-CLAP also informed retrieval-map construction. We report performance observations, informal listener feedback, and release materials for the SDK, dataset artifacts, model, and audiovisual performance interface.

This paper examines several model based approaches for retrieving surface soil moisture from ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 quad-pol imagery, over a lime stone quarry in southeastern Finland. The study primarily targets physically interpretable semi-empirical modeling approaches, with generic ML modeling used as a benchmark. Along with common polarimetric observables, we propose a generalization of the SAR time series based TU Wien soil moisture index (SMI) retrievals examined across several representational spaces derived from polarimetric coherency matrix $[T3]$. This study was conducted over a closed tailing storage facility and a landfill, with a set of 9 repeat pass PALSAR-2 images. The best semi-empirical configuration combining temporal context SMI and current observation PolSAR parameters achieved $R^2=0.67$ and RMSE $=5.65$ volumetric % units. The strongest $SMI_{[T3]}$ approach with sediment-specific calibration, achieved $R^2=0.66$ and RMSE $=5.67$ vol. %, which was considerably better than using $SMI_{HH}$ or $SMI_{VV}$. The proposed approach was sensitive to representations: dB-based projection outperformed linear or trace-normalized $[T3]$ representation. Factoring in sediment information dramatically improved retrieval performance compared to using global model fitting. Machine learning results closely approached but not outperformed semi-empirical model based methodologies. Similarly, they highlighted the need for sediment-specific modeling as well as the importance of including time-series/temporal backscatter dynamics during SSM retrieval. Our study demonstrated the utility of physics based SSM retrieval approaches in the complex multi-sediment mine environment under relatively scarce reference data conditions.