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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

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Thursday 2 July

Signal Processing

Three-Dimensional Spatial Correlation Modeling for Cylindrical mMIMO Arrays in HAPS

High-altitude platform stations (HAPS) are envisioned as a key component of future wireless networks, enabling ultra-wide coverage and providing direct connectivity to users with cylindrical massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems. Exploiting the channel degrees of freedom necessitates accurate modeling and characterization of three-dimensional (3D) channels in the presence of spatial correlation functions (SCFs). However, existing spatial correlation models are primarily developed for planar or linear antenna arrays and cannot be directly applied to cylindrical geometries commonly adopted by HAPS platforms. To address this limitation, this paper derives an exact closed-form expression for the SCF of 3D MIMO channels with antenna elements arranged in a cylindrical array. The proposed formulation is based on the spherical harmonic expansion (SHE) of plane waves and accommodates arbitrary antenna radiation patterns and angular distributions through the Fourier series (FS) coefficients of the power azimuth and zenith spectra. The derived SCF is validated through Monte Carlo simulations under standard-compliant settings.
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Systems and Control

Robust Stabilization of Linear Markov-Jumping Hyperbolic PDEs with Boundary Input Delay

This paper studies the robust stabilization of 2 $\times$ 2 linear hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs) with Markov-jumping parameters and boundary input delay. The main challenge arises from the simultaneous presence of stochastic parameter variations and input delay, which complicates both the stability analysis and controller design. To address this issue, a nominal delay-compensating backstepping controller is first designed for a fixed nominal system. Applying the nominal transformation to the stochastic system yields a target system with additional perturbation terms induced by parameter mismatch. A mode-independent Lyapunov functional is then constructed to establish a pathwise exponential estimate, which directly implies mean-square exponential stability under an explicit small-mismatch condition. The proposed analysis provides a direct robustness certificate for nominal delay compensation without using mode-dependent Lyapunov functionals. Finally, we present simulation results and discuss how the conservative small-mismatch condition should be interpreted for the numerical example.
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All authors Yihuai Zhang, Yidan Cao, Huan Yu, Lu Liu

Systems and Control

A Time-to-Boundary Margin for Transient Stability: Unifying Critical Clearing Time and Operating-Point Drift

The loading margin to voltage collapse – the distance in parameter space to the closest saddle-node bifurcation – is a standard proximity index for voltage stability. This paper develops its transient-stability counterpart: a margin M that measures the time to the synchronism boundary rather than a distance, and that unifies two limits usually treated separately. The critical clearing time (CCT) is the fast, fixed-parameter limit; the slow drift of the operating point toward a static loadability limit is the other. M is defined as the first-passage time of the joint state-parameter motion to the survival boundary. We prove and verify that M equals the CCT exactly on the one-machine-infinite-bus reduction (deviation <= 0.01% across loadings on a published benchmark), establishing a certified single-machine pillar. Under operating-point drift, M yields an operational lead time before faults become unclearable; we take the 28 April 2025 Iberian blackout timeline as an illustrative time scale for the drift rate. On the New England 39-bus system, an independent benchmark, the single-machine-equivalent reduction reproduces the CCT within 1.8-6.0% (conservatively), and a critical slowing-down signature flags proximity to the boundary. For the multimachine case we characterize the limits explicitly: the transfer-conductance work is tightly boundable, while the controlling unstable equilibrium is the binding obstruction to a certified margin.
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Audio and Speech Processing

LMPAN: A Lightweight Multi-Path Alignment Network for Joint Full-Duplex Acoustic Echo Cancellation and Noise Suppression

We propose a lightweight multi-path alignment network (LMPAN) for on-device joint acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and noise suppression (NS) in full-duplex spoken dialogue systems. To address hardware-induced distortions and dynamic acoustic conditions, we introduce three core innovations: (1) a multi-path alignment stage correcting temporal and energy mismatches across reference, linear AEC (LAEC) output, and microphone signals; (2) an attention-based mechanism that dynamically integrates enhanced LAEC and microphone features under varying acoustic scenarios; (3) a post-filtering module with a dynamic target generation strategy for downstream tasks (ASR, VAD). Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage training framework leveraging self-supervised learning representations to enhance perceptual quality. Experiments show that LMPAN, with only 480K parameters and 126 MACs, achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art lightweight model DeepVQE-S, while ensuring real-time inference capability.
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All authors Chengwei Liu, Shaofei Xue, Haoyin Yan, Xiaotao Liang, Zheng Xue

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

A Memory Efficient Unified Algorithm for Online Learning of Linear Dynamical Systems

Motivated by the challenge of stabilizing a general unknown linear dynamical system (LDS) from observations, we study the natural prerequisite of online prediction. Our goal is to achieve sublinear regret with a memory footprint that adapts to the intrinsic complexity of the dynamics rather than the full hidden-state dimension. We focus on the practically central regime of systems with low instability complexity – eigenvalues outside the real stable interval that do not decay rapidly, together with non-semisimple modes – potentially embedded in an otherwise stable real spectrum of much higher dimension; we write $k$ for this count. This regime is the primary setting in which stabilization is plausible: we show that many systems with high instability complexity cannot be stabilized without exponentially large controls. Thus, prediction is meaningful for stabilization precisely when the instability complexity is small. Within this regime, we introduce a unified online algorithm that handles every LDS (including non-diagonalizable systems with complex or exploding modes) with a learnable parameter count of $\widetilde{O}(k)$. Finally, we prove a lower bound showing that $k$ is a valid complexity measure: any filter-based predictor needs at least $k$ filters. Experiments corroborate our theory: on a high-dimensional system, our predictor sharply outperforms prior methods at an equal parameter budget.
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Signal Processing

Antenna System for Simultaneous Wireless Power and Information Transfer to Brain Implants

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have revolutionized neuroscience applications, from motor rehabilitation to neuroergonomics. Traditional implantable BCIs with invasive microelectrode arrays pose challenges, notably the need for wired connections and inherent implantation risks. This paper introduces a battery-free wireless BCI system, consolidating an implant and its external supporting system. Our design centers on a dual-function antenna system: firstly, an inductive coupling mechanism enables wireless power transfer, sufficiently powering the implant's Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for stimulation and readout without an implant battery. Secondly, a backscatter antenna in the implant facilitates battery-free, high-data-rate wireless connectivity (up to 32 Mbps). This system not only enhances the BCI experience by eliminating wires but also retains data fidelity and energy efficiency, promising a safer, more efficient interface for tasks like robotic arm control.
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Signal Processing

Integrated Wake-Up Radio and MIMO Solution for Cellular IoT Networks

Wake-up radio (WUR) is a technology designed to enhance the energy efficiency of Internet of Things (IoT) networks and extend device battery life. While most studies focus on WUR performance with single-antenna base stations, this paper investigates the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology to improve device energy saving and extend the coverage of wake-up signals. By leveraging MIMO beamforming, the transmitted energy can be spatially focused toward the intended IoT devices, with high beamforming gain and minimal inter-device interference. We develop a preliminary analytical framework using stochastic geometry to evaluate the wake-up success probability of WUR-MIMO in multi-cell cellular IoT networks, when the number of antennas equals $2 \times (\text{number of devices}) - 1$. Monte Carlo simulations show that, relative to a single-antenna WUR baseline, MIMO beamforming significantly enhances wake-up reliability when this antenna configuration is applied, mitigates more than 50% of false activations across all settings, and thereby prolongs the lifetime of IoT devices.
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All authors Israa Khaled, Ammar El Falou, Nour Kouzayha, Charlotte Langlais

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It

Channel State Information (CSI) has become a widely used wireless channel sensing modality for applications such as indoor localization, activity recognition, and respiration monitoring. Because collecting labeled data under every target condition is impractical, training CSI-based models often relies on simulated data produced by adding noise or perturbations to recorded channel estimates, most commonly additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This practice assumes that the receiver chain between the antenna and the channel estimator is linear and gain-invariant. We test this assumption empirically using RF jamming as a controlled perturbation on 6 commodity receivers across 2 indoor environments. The assumption does not hold. Automatic gain control compresses the channel estimate multiplicatively before digitization, producing amplitude distributions that no additive noise variance can reproduce. To close the resulting fidelity gap, we propose M_QTC, a measurement-calibrated model that learns the per-subcarrier distribution transformation through quantile mapping, temporal filtering, and copula-based cross-subcarrier reordering. M_QTC reduces amplitude error 8-fold and closes 89% of the aggregate fidelity gap across four complementary dimensions. The improvement transfers directly to downstream tasks, where 5 classifiers from different families trained on M_QTC-simulated data recover 93% of real-data jamming detection performance, while AWGN-trained classifiers remain near random decision.
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All authors Aymen Bouferroum, Ildi Alla, Vincent Lenders, Valeria Loscri

Audio and Speech Processing

Neural Audio Codec with Adjustable Token Temporal Resolution Using Sampling-Frequency-Independent Convolutional Layers

Discrete tokens obtained from neural audio codecs (NACs) have been used as compact representations in audio generation and understanding models. In such token-based systems, token temporal resolution (TTR), defined as the time interval between adjacent token frames, is important because it controls the trade-off between representing rapid acoustic events and reducing token-sequence length. However, most NACs are trained at a single TTR and require separate training for each TTR. This paper proposes a mechanism that enables a single NAC to operate at multiple TTRs using sampling-frequency-independent convolutional layers. The mechanism regards TTR as the sampling period of the token sequence and generates TTR-dependent convolutional kernels from a shared parameter set, while adjusting the kernel size and stride for each TTR. We incorporate the mechanism into Descript Audio Codec, leaving the quantizer unchanged. Experiments on environmental sound reconstruction show that the proposed model outperforms a single-model baseline that switches TTR-specific layers for each TTR.
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All authors Tomohiko Nakamura, Wataru Nakata, Kanami Imamura, Yuki Saito

Audio and Speech Processing

Self-Supervised Test-Time Tuning for Packet Loss Concealment

Packet loss concealment (PLC) reconstructs audio packets that are missing at the receiver, usually with a trained model whose parameters remain fixed at deployment time. This treats the PLC model as static, even though each call or recording exposes signal-specific information through the packets that did arrive. We present TTT-PLC, a self-supervised test-time tuning framework that adapts existing PLC models using only those received packets. The method creates supervision by synthetically masking portions of the available signal, training the model to conceal them with its native PLC objective, and then using the adapted model to reconstruct the true packet losses. No clean reference signal, external adaptation data, or architectural modification is required. We study TTT-PLC in two deployment settings. In the non-causal setting, the received file is available before reconstruction, allowing repeated self-supervised adaptation passes and providing a per-file adaptation ceiling. In the causal setting, audio is streamed without revising emitted samples; adaptation is performed only on completed past blocks, and updated parameters affect only future audio. We instantiate the framework on two public PLC backbones, FRN, a recurrent full-band speech PLC model, and PARCnet, a hybrid autoregressive-neural model for networked music. Across these settings, the results show that pretrained PLC systems do not need to be treated as fixed at inference time, the still-observed portions of a lossy signal can provide an effective training signal for improving concealment on that same signal.
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Systems and Control

Koopman operator theory: fundamentals, control, and applications

The Koopman operator has gained considerable attention due to its ability to provide a global linear representation of highly complex dynamical systems. The operator describes nonlinear dynamics in a linear way through the lens of real- or complex-valued observable functions. Data-driven techniques, like extended dynamic mode decomposition (EDMD), kernel EDMD, and machine-learning methods, can be used to generate finite-dimensional approximations accompanied by finite-data error bounds. In this tutorial paper, we provide a concise introduction into Koopman operator theory and its use in systems and control. A particular focus is put on data-driven surrogate models, their extension to systems with inputs, and controller design using Koopman operator theory. Moreover, we demonstrate the key techniques, i.e., EDMD and Koopman MPC. To this end, we provide simulation studies including source code on GitHub to enable the interested reader to experience the Koopman operator in systems and control step by step.
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All authors Igor Mezić, Jorge Cortés, Karl Worthmann, Mircea Lazar, Armin Lederer

Signal Processing

Scene-Conditioned PINN-GNN for Multipath RF Maps: Cross-Scene Generation and In-Scene Completion

Radio frequency (RF) maps provide a compact representation of multipath propagation characteristics and are fundamental to channel modeling, coverage analysis, and environment-aware wireless optimization. This paper proposes a unified RF map construction framework based on a physics-informed neural network (PINN) and a graph neural network (GNN), supporting both cross-scene generation and in-scene completion with 2D and 2.5D environmental representations. The PINN embeds electromagnetic propagation constraints to establish a physically consistent mapping from receiver locations to multipath parameters, including path gain, time of arrival, and angles, while the GNN enforces spatial consistency by modeling correlations among neighboring receivers. To comprehensively evaluate multipath reconstruction quality, we propose a peak-weighted dynamic time warping metric that jointly accounts for amplitude errors and peak delay misalignment in channel impulse responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms image-based, diffusion-based, and interpolation baselines across both map-level and multipath-level metrics, achieving robust generalization and high-fidelity RF map construction under sparse observations.
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All authors Lizhou Liu, Xiaohui Chen, Zihan Tang, Mengyao Ma, Wenyi Zhang

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

LLM-Empowered Multimodal Fusion Framework for Autonomous Driving: Semantic Enhancement and Channel-Adaptive Design

Vision-radar fusion is central to robust autonomous driving, combining dense visual semantics with precise range and velocity measurements from radar. However, real-world fusion quality is fundamentally challenged by dynamically varying input quality, stemming from occlusion, adverse weather, and channel noise. To address this, we re-frame the problem from static data fusion to channel-aware semantic reasoning and propose a Large Language Model-centric Semantic-layer Channel-aware Integrated Perception (LM-SCIP) framework. It places a Large Language Model (LLM) as a central reasoning core to fuse a local visual stream with a quality-varying external radar stream used to cover perception-blind spots. Concretely, LM-SCIP couples a hierarchical radar-vision encoder with a Channel-Adaptive Semantic Module (CASM) that maps link indicators into a "Channel Prompt" to dynamically gate external radar features. A parameter-efficient, LoRA-tuned LLM, in conjunction with a heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts (H-MoE), then arbitrates between local visual cues and the channel-conditioned radar context. Finally, a decoupled multi-task decoder outputs localization, trajectory forecasting, and image reconstruction. Experiments on nuScenes and VIRAT validate our approach. On nuScenes, under a controlled toggle of radar input, LM-SCIP reduces localization RMSE by 40.0% versus a vision-only baseline. On VIRAT, the model attains a 0.214m localization RMSE and 0.179m minFDE (k=1). These results reveal that the proposed LM-SCIP enables a robust vision-dominant fallback at low SNR and synergistic fusion at high SNR.
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All authors Wen Wang, Yaping Sun, Yejun He, Hao Chen, Zhiyong Chen, Xiaodong Xu, Nan Ma, Shuguang Cui

Signal Processing

Rethinking Fractional Programming for Joint Uplink Scheduling and Power Control in Multicell Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the joint uplink scheduling and power control problem in a coordinated multicell wireless network, where at most one single-antenna user is allowed to access the single-antenna base station in each cell simultaneously. The resulting weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization problem is a mixed discrete-continuous, nonconvex optimization problem that is notoriously difficult to solve directly. Classical fractional programming (FP) methods tackle this problem by leveraging the Lagrangian dual transform (LDT) followed by the quadratic transform (QT), yielding a tractable closed-form solution for scheduling and power control, with the LDT playing a crucial role in handling discrete variables. In this paper, we revisit the LDT from a minorization-maximization (MM) perspective and observe that its induced surrogate is somehow conservative due to the reciprocal-coordinate construction. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel reciprocal-inversion transform (RIT) that constructs a tighter first-order Taylor expansion lower bound for the logarithmic rate function. The proposed RIT remains fully compatible with the QT, leading to a surrogate-enhanced FP (SEFP) algorithm for joint uplink scheduling and power control. The proposed SEFP algorithm retains the desirable per-cell separability of the classical FP framework and admits closed-form updates for the auxiliary variables, scheduling decisions, and transmit powers. Simulation results demonstrate that the SEFP algorithm consistently outperforms the classical FP method and other baselines for different network utilities.
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All authors Zihan Jiao, Xinping Yi, Shi Jin, Giuseppe Caire

Systems and Control

Development and Identification of a Linear Low-Speed Ship Maneuvering Model from Full-Scale Data

Despite significant technological progress, the realization of fully autonomous berthing and unberthing remains a significant challenge. One of the primary obstacles is the complex, non-linear nature of low-speed ship dynamics, which are difficult to model and control and often necessitate equally complex maneuvering models and control systems. This study proposes a simplified approach to bridge this gap by modeling the ship dynamics in the form of a time-invariant, continuous-time linear state-space system. The model parameters are estimated through system identification using the Covariance Adaptation Strategy Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) applied to full-scale maneuvering data. Validation results demonstrate a strong agreement between the model output and empirical data. This outcome demonstrates the significant potential of simplified models to effectively define the maneuvering motion of a ship at low speeds.
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All authors Agnes N. Mwange, Taichi Kambara, Kouki Wakita, Kazuyoshi Hosogaya, Atsuo Maki

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Reward Observability and the Limits of Offline Checkpoint Selection in RSSM World Models

We study the closed-loop properties of a recurrent state-space model (RSSM) world model trained on human demonstrations in Gymnasium's LunarLander-v3. We use the trained world model for zero-shot CEM model-predictive control (MPC) and for actor-critic (A2C) training in imagination. Scored on 100 held-out episodes, the selected model-based A2C policy (trained on world-model checkpoint 280) reaches a mean return of +189.5, matching the best model-free A2C checkpoint (+183.7; 600- and 1000-step episode caps respectively) with ~65x fewer real training transitions. We also compare world-model MPC with a behaviour-cloning (BC) policy trained on the successful demonstrations. The BC policy matches MPC's mean return only under stochastic action selection, and on the same 20 episodes it has one catastrophic episode where MPC has none. We then introduce the Reward Observability Fraction (ROF), the Euclidean fraction of the reward gradient in the observable subspace of the linearized latent dynamics, and show that the next H observations carry Fisher information about every direction in this subspace and none about directions orthogonal to it. ROF itself however depends on how the latent is scaled: rescaling it changes ROF but not the model, so raw levels are not comparable across models. Forcing the reward head onto the posterior-corrected latent z raises ROF, and the rise survives a coordinate-invariant check on the pair of runs we tested. Finally, we test whether ROF or other offline metrics can predict the closed-loop collapse of MPC. Collapse varies between training runs with identical data and configuration. ROF does not predict it, none of the 108 offline summaries we screened passes a permutation test, and the best candidate fails on new runs. Predicting collapse offline from the model and logged data alone remains open.
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Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Rethinking Speech-LLM Integration for ASR: Effective Joint Speech-Text Training by Interleaving

Speech-LLM integration has shown promising results by leveraging extensive textual pretraining, yet its specific benefits for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain unclear. We observe that as supervised ASR training data increases, the contribution of LLM priors becomes less evident, and simple speech-text joint training under-utilizes textual knowledge. We therefore propose Joint Speech-Text Interleaved Pretraining (JSTIP), an ASR-oriented pretraining strategy that constructs word-level and segment-level interleaved speech-text sequences within aligned pairs for speech-LLM architectures that accept continuous inputs. Experiments on 38k hours of ASR data show consistent entity accuracy improvement compared to ASR-only and joint speech-text training baselines. JSTIP achieves on-par entity recognition performance using domain transcription text compared to synthetic speech-text pairs, simplifying domain adaptation. Benefiting from textual pretraining and domain text data, JSTIP is competitive with open-source ASR and Speech-LLM systems in medical entity recognition. The zero-shot speech question answering behaviors further suggest that interleaving reduces the speech-text modality gap and preserves the LLM generative prior, which is likely the reason for the entity improvements on the ASR task.
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All authors Ruchao Fan, Yiming Wang, Rui Zhao, Liliang Ren, Keqi Deng, Xiaoyang Chen, Ali Zare, Bo Ren, Yuxuan Hu, Junkun Chen, Yan Huang, Yelong Shen, Jinyu Li

Image and Video Processing

Quantum-Inspired Vision: Leveraging Wave-Particle Duality for Low-Illumination Enhancement

This study provides a theoretical expansion of the recent Data Relativistic Uncertainty (DRU) framework by formalizing a physics-to-AI paradigm for image enhancement. By modeling images as probabilistic wave functions rather than deterministic states, the paradigm explicitly integrates wave-particle duality to illustrate the system flow of how DRU leverages the intrinsic physical uncertainty of light, a dimension requiring further theoretical discussion. Consequently, this paradigm provides a rigorous Explainable AI (XAI) approach that enhances the interpretability of how DRU mitigates illumination bias and maintains robustness against data noise.
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Systems and Control

A Dynamic Phasor Framework for Analysis of Subsynchronous Oscillations in Multi-Machine Systems with IBRs and Large Loads

Although the electromagnetic transient (EMT) framework can capture subsynchronous oscillations (SSOs), it faces scalability issues for large-scale systems. Thus motivated, we propose a generalized dynamic phasor (DP) framework to analyze SSOs in multi-machine systems with inverter-based resources (IBRs) and large loads such as artificial intelligence data centers (AI DCs) under balanced and unbalanced conditions. The grid-following (GFL) and grid-forming (GFM) IBRs are modeled in their respective $dq$-frame DPs. In contrast, the detailed model of multi-mass turbine driven synchronous generators (SGs) along with dynamic transmission network models and loads are represented in $pnz$-frame DPs. The linearizability and time-invariance of the framework enable us to perform eigen decomposition, which is a powerful tool for root-cause analysis of SSO modes and the design of damping controllers. In addition, the DP modeling approach facilitates faster simulation of large-scale systems. The generalized framework is validated with EMTDC/PSCAD simulations using the IEEE first benchmark model for subsynchronous resonance and the modified IEEE 4-machine system. Several use cases are presented on the modified IEEE 68-bus system with two GFL IBRs to show the applicability of the framework. First, time- and frequency-domain analyses of the IBR-induced SSO mode are presented. Then, two solutions are proposed to damp the poorly damped SSO mode: (a) a decentralized controller is designed using particle swarm optimization, and (b) the control of one GFL IBR is replaced by GFM control. Finally, the impact of AI DC load on primary frequency response of the system and the multi-mass turbines of the SGs are studied.
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All authors Fiaz Hossain, Nilanjan Ray Chaudhuri, Constantino M. Lagoa, Alok Sinha, ai Gopal Vennelaganti, Mohammed E. Nassar

Systems and Control

Decentralized Stability Certificates in IBR-Dominated Grids: The Role of the Network State

Small-signal instabilities, such as unforced sub-synchronous oscillations (SSOs), are increasingly observed in inverter-based resource (IBR) dominated grids. While decentralized stability certificates offer a scalable means to avoid instability onset, they are typically derived under restrictive network-state assumptions–such as small angle differences or negligible voltage drops–that cannot capture how departures from these conditions affect system stability. In this paper, we develop a network model and a decentralized analysis framework that explicitly characterizes how reactive power mismatches, line loading, and inverter control parameters jointly determine small-signal stability. We show that increased steady-state reactive power mismatches and line loading lead to more stringent conditions on admissible inverter droop gains. These results make decentralized stability certificates explicitly network-state dependent, showing how network stress shrinks the set of stabilizing local controller parameters.
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All authors Zhimeng Wang, Sushobhan Chatterjee, Sijia Geng, Richard Pates, Enrique Mallada

Systems and Control

A Unified Framework for Hybrid Grid-Forming and Grid-Following Inverter Control

This paper proposes a novel unified control framework for achieving hybrid grid-forming (GFM) and grid-following (GFL) inverter operation by integrating dispatchable virtual oscillator control with reference-following synchronization. The proposed inverter control method supports multiple operating modes within a unified structure, including voltage- and frequency-following (PQ mode), voltage-forming and frequency-following (PV mode), voltage-following and frequency-forming (Qf mode), voltage- and frequency-forming (Vf mode), and a hybrid mode with mixed GFM and GFL behaviors. In particular, the proposed method achieves smooth pre-synchronization and enables seamless transitions across a spectrum of inverter operating modes by tuning a small set of continuous control parameters, rather than relying on discrete controller switching. This framework provides a flexible and physically interpretable approach for adapting inverter dynamics to varying grid conditions and operational requirements. The small-signal stability and input-output frequency-domain characteristics are further analyzed under different control parameter settings. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed unified control method are demonstrated through extensive electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments.
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Audio and Speech Processing

Enhancing Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion with Multi-Target Pretraining for Low-Resource Settings

Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion (AAI) estimates vocal tract articulator movements from speech, benefiting tasks like ASR, speech synthesis, and speaker verification. While deep learning-based methods (CNNs, RNNs, Transformers) have advanced AAI, recent studies show that Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) features further enhance performance, particularly in low-resource settings. However, SSL feature extractors introduce inference latency and computational overhead. To address this, we propose a novel pretraining method leveraging three target representations-Phoneme Labels, Articulatory Feature Labels, and Critical-articulator Labels-eliminating the need for an SSL extractor during inference. We evaluate our approach against both baseline and SSL-based models across various data conditions. Results demonstrate that our method consistently improves AAI performance, particularly in low-resource scenarios, while significantly reducing inference costs without sacrificing accuracy.
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Signal Processing

Waveform Design for Underwater Simultaneous Acoustic Information and Power Transfer

Simultaneous acoustic information and power transfer (SAIPT) plays a crucial role in enabling self-sustainable and maintenance-free Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) networks. This paper studies a multicarrier underwater SAIPT system that jointly considers the frequency-dependent characteristics of acoustic transducers and the nonlinear behavior of rectifier circuits. The waveform vector is firstly optimized using the successive convex approximation (SCA) method under constraints on average and peak transmit power for acoustic power transfer (APT). Then, in the SAIPT scenario, both the power splitting factor and waveform vectors are jointly optimized through an alternating optimization (AO) framework based on SCA, subject to transmit power and achievable rate constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that incorporating the transducer's frequency response, rectifier nonlinearity, and the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of multicarrier waveforms leads to a significant improvement in acoustic energy transfer efficiency. The results also show that the energy harvesting DC output can be further enhanced by properly choosing system parameters, such as the number of subcarriers and subcarrier spacing.
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All authors Jinheng Kang, Yizhe Zhao, Kun Yang, Jun Liu

Audio and Speech Processing

Beyond Words: Towards Effective Modeling of Non-Verbal Vocalizations in ASR

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems excel at transcribing lexical content but often omit nonverbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, breaths, coughs, and cries, that carry conversational and affective information. Modeling NVs in ASR is challenging because NV annotations are sparse and highly long-tailed, with frequent categories such as breaths and laughter dominating rarer events such as cries and coughs. We study three data-centric strategies for improving low-resource NV recognition: (1) a two-stage curriculum that first maps all NV events to a generic token and then fine-tunes on target categories; (2) inter-token transfer from high-resource events, such as laughter and breath, to rare events, such as crying; and (3) voice-conversion augmentation with class balancing. Experiments show that shared acoustic structure across vocal events can be exploited to improve rare-category detection while preserving lexical ASR quality.
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All authors Gene-Ping Yang, Haibin Wu, Peng Su, Ruizhe Huang, Suwon Shon, Bach Do, Minxue Niu, Zhaoheng Ni, Shang-Wen Li, Florian Metze, Yossi Adi, Ming Sun, Yuzong Liu

Wednesday 1 July

Systems and Control

Counterfactual Closing-Acceleration Risk: An Anticipatory Surrogate Safety Measure for the Blind Region of Car-Following

Surrogate safety measures allow road-safety assessment from trajectory data in which crashes are absent, yet the dominant proximity measures - time-to-collision (TTC) and its variants - assume invariant motion and are undefined whenever the following vehicle is not yet faster than its leader, so a large fraction of car-following carries no risk reading at all. This paper introduces Counterfactual Closing-Acceleration Risk (CCAR), an anticipatory surrogate measure that scores how exposed a follower is to a rear-end conflict if its leader were to brake, conditioned on the follower's current gap-closing acceleration. CCAR is evaluated on 745,540 expressway car-following frames from the SQM-W-1 trajectory dataset. Conventional measures leave 51% of frames unscored because the follower is not yet faster; across this blind region CCAR returns a graded, non-trivial risk in 98.8% of frames. CCAR is not redundant with existing measures (Spearman correlation 0.54 with modified TTC; top-decile risk-set overlap 0.19), and at fixed gap and speed its risk rises monotonically with closing acceleration. A controlled simulation with a reactive Intelligent Driver Model follower and a scripted leader brake confirms that, holding gap and brake fixed, the actual collision rate rises with closing acceleration, supporting the proposed precursor mechanism. Parameter sensitivity, limitations, and implications for forward-collision-warning systems are discussed.
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Signal Processing

Multimodal EEG-IMU Fusion for Motor Assessment: Leveraging Task-Dependent Complementarity for Robustness

Movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease require comprehensive motor assessment, but reliable digital assessment pipelines integrating multiple sensing modalities across diverse motor tasks remain insufficiently characterized. We present a proof-of-concept study evaluating task-specific modality performance and multimodal fusion across ten motor activities. Synchronized EEG-IMU data were recorded from six participants (52 recording pairs). We evaluated an EEGNet + Transformer model for 16-channel EEG (125 Hz) and XGBoost on hand-crafted accelerometer and gyroscope features (25 Hz). Under 5-fold cross-validation in a subject-dependent setting, IMU achieved 94.41+/-0.58% accuracy and outperformed EEG on 7 of 10 activities, while EEG achieved 92.82+/-1.45% and showed lower error for rhythmic cycling (4.03% vs. 12.10%). Late fusion via logistic regression reached 98.68+/-0.32%, giving an 81.5% error reduction versus EEG alone and improving worst-task accuracy from approximately 87% for a single modality to 96.76%. Fusion also reduced cross-task performance variance from approximately 3% to 1.06% (paired t-test, p < 0.001, df = 4; p-values approximate given fold dependence), showing more uniform reliability across the assessment battery. Although the small sample limits generalizability, these results suggest that EEG and IMU provide asymmetric, task-dependent strengths and that late fusion can leverage this complementarity to improve assessment reliability. This study provides methodological and empirical motivation for larger-scale clinical validation in movement disorder populations.
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Signal Processing

A Unified Multi-Modal Sensing and Active-Stabilization Framework for Autonomous IoT Nodes in Connectivity-Denied Environments: From Perimeter Sentinel to High-Value Cargo Protection

Autonomous embedded nodes deployed in connectivity-denied environments - remote forest perimeters, farm boundaries, and cargo in transit across highways or open ocean - share a common set of engineering requirements that are usually addressed by separate, purpose-built systems: passive-infrared (PIR) triggered wake-up, inertial-measurement-unit (IMU) driven active stabilization, and long-range communication under strict power budgets. This paper argues that a perimeter/wildlife security turret and a high-value cargo protection crate are, from a systems perspective, two parametrizations of the same generalized node architecture rather than two unrelated designs. We formalize this generalized architecture, extend it with three sensing/communication modalities not present in either original design - single-point LiDAR ranging, a LoRa/LoRaWAN regional mesh tier, and a satellite short-burst-data (SBD) global tier - and couple the resulting telemetry to a Geographic Information System (GIS) layer via a proposed Composite Risk Index (CRI) that fuses breach events, impact severity, and connectivity state into a single spatially-referenced score. We present the sensor-fusion, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) stabilization, link-budget, received-signal-strength-indicator (RSSI) localization, and CRI formulations that unify the two deployment modes, provide a simulated closed-loop stabilization response and a tiered-communication trade-off analysis, and instantiate the two original projects as case studies of the generalized architecture. The framework is intended as an engineering blueprint and a starting point for field validation rather than as a report of field-tested results.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Wind-Aware Reinforcement Learning Control of a Small Quadrotor Using Learned Onboard Wind Estimation in Simulated Atmospheric Turbulence

Small multirotor aircraft are increasingly tasked with operations in the atmospheric boundary layer, where turbulent winds comparable to the vehicle's airspeed degrade trajectory tracking and can defeat conventional feedback control. This work illustrates a two-stage learning pipeline that first estimates the local wind from onboard kinematics and dynamics and then exploits that estimate inside a reinforcement learning (RL) flight controller. The wind estimator, an attention-augmented gated recurrent network trained on thousands of simulated flights through von Karman turbulence with power-law shear and veer, recovers the horizontal wind vector with a per-flight root-mean-square error of 0.40 m/s and a direction error of 3.2 degrees on unseen wind regimes, an accuracy near the floor imposed by unresolved turbulence, and generalizes to vertical ascent profiles with a skill score of 0.861 over a constant-wind reference. A proximal policy optimization controller receiving the frozen estimator's output reduces horizontal trajectory tracking error by 48% relative to a wind-blind proportional-derivative baseline across mean winds of 4 m/s to 12 m/s, winning on 100% of evaluation episodes. A three-way ablation decomposes this improvement into a kinematic component, available without wind information, and a wind-perception component; the perception share rises with wind speed, from small in light winds toward roughly half the total benefit in strong winds, consistent with the quadratic scaling of aerodynamic drag. The controller degrades gracefully on out-of-distribution winds of 13 m/s to 15 m/s, where the baseline fails catastrophically.
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Systems and Control

Robust and Explainable 3D Mode Shape Recognition Using Region-Aware Graph Neural Networks

Mode shape recognition is a fundamental task in automotive NVH development, yet it remains dependent on manual visual inspection by experienced engineers. Existing approaches based on engineering heuristics, Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC), or geometry-dependent AI representations often exhibit limited robustness across different vehicle architectures, finite element (FE) meshes, and experimental measurement layouts, restricting their industrial applicability. This paper presents a Canonical Engineering Graph Representation and region-aware graph learning framework for robust and explainable 3D mode shape recognition. Rather than learning directly from vehicle-specific FE meshes, heterogeneous FE models and experimental measurements are transformed into a common graph whose nodes represent semantically meaningful structural regions connected through engineering-informed relationships. Geometry-independent regional descriptors are combined with graph attention learning and region-aware pooling to capture structural interactions while preserving engineering semantics and enabling physically interpretable predictions. The resulting representation decouples engineering knowledge from numerical discretization, allowing transfer across different vehicle programs without requiring identical mesh topology or sensor configurations. The proposed framework is validated using FE and experimental datasets from four vehicle programs under severe label scarcity. Results demonstrate high classification accuracy, cross-vehicle transferability, and physically meaningful explanations by directly relating predictions to engineering-defined structural regions used in NVH analysis. Beyond mode shape recognition, the proposed Canonical Engineering Graph Representation provides a reusable engineering abstraction for trustworthy and transferable AI across heterogeneous simulation and experimental workflows.
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All authors Tong Duy Son, Marc Brughmans, Andrey Hense, Kohta Sugiura, Sebastian Ciceo, Paolo di Carlo, Theo Geluk

Systems and Control

Context-Triggered Robust MPC for Temporal Logic Specifications

We consider the problem of synthesizing robust feedback controllers for discrete-time linear systems that ensure the satisfaction of context-dependent linear temporal logic specifications in the presence of additive bounded disturbances. Building on existing results that reduce context-triggered temporal logic synthesis to the realization of context-dependent reach-avoid-stay (cRAS) objectives, we focus on the corresponding low-level control synthesis problem. We first employ certificate-based conditions for the almost-sure satisfaction of RAS specifications. Based on these conditions, we propose a switching control architecture that combines robust model predictive control (MPC) with a local invariant controller, and show that the resulting MPC value function serves as a reachability certificate while avoidance is enforced through robust constraints and the stay is enforced via the local controller. To obtain computationally tractable formulations for the resulting robust optimizations, we employ convex duality to reformulate the robust constraints into equivalent deterministic optimization problems, yielding convex quadratic and second-order cone programs for relevant geometric settings. The proposed framework is demonstrated on a robot navigation problem with context-triggered logical switches in both static and moving environments. The results show significantly larger feasible sets than Lyapunov-based approaches, while naturally accommodating dynamic environments and online task reconfiguration.
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All authors Arash Bahari Kordabad, Satya Prakash Nayak, Sadegh Soudjani, Anne-Kathrin Schmuck