Papers

Point cloud compression relies on techniques to compress both geometry and attributes. Motion-based approaches for dynamic solid point cloud geometry compression within the geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) framework have achieved significant reductions in geometry rate. However, motion-based techniques for attribute compression remain underexplored, making it challenging to achieve significant reductions in the temporal redundancy of attributes. Firstly, this paper proposes a geometry-based inter-coding scheme to compress the attributes of dynamic solid point clouds. Secondly, a graph-based motion-estimation scheme for point-cloud attribute compression is proposed. Thirdly, an interpolation-free fractional-voxel motion estimation method is proposed to refine motion accuracy to fractional-voxel precision. Our experimental results on the MPEG point cloud dataset show that the proposed scheme outperforms G-PCC, GeS-TM, and V-PCC in lossless and lossy geometry conditions. We achieve average bitrate savings of $55.3\%$, $42.3\%$, and $16.5\%$ over G-PCC, GeS-TM, and V-PCC, respectively, under lossy-geometry conditions.

In contested environments, autonomous vehicles may need to plan around adversarial pursuers whose launch locations are unknown. This paper presents an interception-driven inverse-reachability framework for inferring a feasible pursuer launch region directly from observed interception events for a single pursuer. Each interception induces a geometric constraint on the unknown launch location, and intersecting these constraints yields a bounded set guaranteed to contain the true origin under maximum-capability assumptions. Mapping this inferred set through the pursuer reachable region produces deterministic engagement zones with an explicit worst-case safety interpretation. A probabilistic extension models uncertainty in the pursuer launch location and yields graded engagement-risk fields for risk-aware planning. To accelerate localization, we introduce an information-driven planner for sacrificial agents that selects trajectories to maximize expected contraction of the feasible launch region. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed framework rapidly reduces launch-location uncertainty and enables substantially shorter safe trajectories after only a small number of sacrificial deployments.

Adaptive token processing has emerged as a promising approach for improving the efficiency of semantic communication systems. However, existing semantic communication frameworks largely overlook token-level multiple access and the impact of semantic interference among simultaneously transmitted semantic tokens. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Token Selection and Token-Domain Multiple Access (ATS-ToDMA), a novel cross-modal semantic communication framework that jointly performs semantic token selection, interference-aware scheduling, and semantic-aware power allocation. The proposed framework introduces a Semantic Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SSINR) metric that captures the combined effects of channel impairments and semantic interference arising from token similarity. A transformer-based scheduler is developed to allocate selected semantic tokens across token-domain transmission slots while mitigating both intra-modal and cross-modal semantic interference. To characterize the behavior of the proposed system, analytical bounds on semantic interference and feasible token occupancy are derived, together with a closed-form approximation for semantic-aware power allocation. Simulation results demonstrate significant gains in semantic throughput and semantic decoding accuracy while reducing aggregate semantic interference and transmit power compared with OMA, Semantic NOMA, Random-TS, and Greedy ATS benchmarks.

This letter analyzes the performance of on-off digital noise (OODN) modulation under multi-user scenarios. While prior works have addressed single-link operation, the impact of co-channel interference remains unexplored. We consider $K$ synchronous OODN interferers over AWGN and fading channels and derive a unified analytical framework for the bit error probability (BEP). The optimal likelihood-ratio detection threshold is obtained, along with a closed-form expression for the resulting irreducible error floor, which climbs geometrically with the number of co-channel interferers and yields a simple admission-control rule on network density. The analysis is extended to $\kappa$-$\mu$ fading, covering practical millimeter-wave channels with dominant line-of-sight components. Results, corroborated by Monte Carlo simulation, show that the floor is governed by the on-off interference and the non-coherent detector rather than by the noise waveform.

We consider a swarm array of autonomous relays that seek to cooperatively forward a desired signal to a fusion center with the maximum possible fidelity while canceling out a number of interferers. We present a distributed algorithm for computing the optimal zero-forcing beamforming weights at the relays without requiring prior channel knowledge. Crucially, our algorithm is scale-free in the sense that the computational and bandwidth overheads are completely independent of the size of the array. We build on recent work that introduced the concept of a Collective Array that enables such scale-free computation by imposing a constraint that the array must always function as a swarm i.e. array elements can only ever communicate with external nodes collectively and never individually. While this is a very severe restriction, we show that it allows useful computations such as zero-forcing beamforming while being robust to noise and channel time-variations.

How much does a vocalization change over the course of development? We propose trajectory variance, a per-vocalization plasticity score that answers this question without type labels. A displacement model learns to predict age-conditioned shifts in autoencoder latent space; the variance of its predictions across target ages quantifies how much each vocalization would change if produced at different developmental stages. Evaluated on three zebra finches (183K-274K vocalizations, 40-101 days post-hatch), trajectory variance separates learned song syllables from innate calls (Cohen's d = 0.29-0.57, AUC = 0.58-0.67, after controlling for duration), while no nonparametric baseline achieves consistent separation. Trajectory variance also correlates with spectral flatness across all three birds (r = -0.48 to -0.75): more plastic vocalizations tend to have more tonal, structured spectra.

Benchmarking immersive media coding solutions, especially in the standardization context, requires reliable and reproducible subjective quality assessment (QA) procedures, along with objective quality metrics that remain accurate across different distortion types. This paper presents a standardized workflow for light field QA, developed and deployed in the context of JPEG Pleno standardization activities, which integrates benchmark generation, a hybrid subjective evaluation, and objective metric analysis into a common workflow. The benchmark is designed to encompass not only traditional coding-only artifacts but also distortions that arise in processing pipelines in which light field encoding is accompanied with view synthesis and reconstruction techniques. A hybrid subjective method is proposed enabling fine-grained assessment by combining reference-anchored quality rating with targeted pairwise refinement in perceptually ambiguous regions. The reliability of subjective scores is verified using statistical consistency analyses between observers of two cohorts. Finally, a large set of objective metrics is systematically evaluated in terms of global prediction accuracy, local agreement in ambiguous quality regions, and robustness across distortion families. The results show that several metrics achieve strong agreement for coding-only stimuli, but their performance consistently drops when view synthesis distortions are included. The analysis further highlights the importance of view-pooling strategy in the design of future light field quality metrics. The work provides a reproducible and standardization-ready framework for fine-grained light field QA, while identifying key limitations of current objective metrics under emerging coding pipelines. The subjectively annotated dataset is publicly available at https://plenodb.jpeg.org/lfqa/objectivecfp.

Monitoring electromechanical oscillations is crucial for maintaining the stability of modern power systems, particularly in the presence of increasing penetrations of inverter-based resources (IBRs), which introduce new dynamic behaviors. In this work, we propose a hierarchical multiscale framework based on the SINDy-SENDAI algorithm to characterize the transient dynamics captured by wide-area measurements. The proposed deep learning architecture robustly separates low- and high-frequency components embedded in sensor data and incorporates a Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (SINDy) module in the latent space to identify parsimonious governing equations. In contrast to conventional deep learning approaches that often produce black-box models with limited interpretability, the proposed framework learns an explicit dynamical representation, enabling physical interpretation, stability assessment, and forecasting of electromechanical oscillations. Given the societal importance of modern power systems, the proposed approach is specifically designed to satisfy key requirements for practical deployment, namely robustness, interpretability, and stable performance under diverse operating conditions. The framework is first validated on the two-area Kundur test system using conventional modal analysis as ground truth and subsequently demonstrated on two real-world datasets: the 2016 Iberian oscillatory event and the 2021 ambient measurements from the southern Italian power grid. The results show that SINDy-SENDAI consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art Hankel-DMD method and that the learned latent dynamics are sufficiently informative to accurately reconstruct and predict the behavior of the full system in the original state space.

Channel charting (CC) enables data-driven user localization in wireless networks by embedding channel state information (CSI) into low-dimensional representations. In multi-cell scenarios, each base station independently learns a local chart via neural encoders, leading to misaligned representation spaces across overlapping coverage areas. This lack of consistency hinders network-level tasks such as user tracking, handover prediction, and resource allocation. To address this issue, we propose a principled framework for multi-site channel charting based on topological signal processing. We model the collection of local charts as a network sheaf, which encodes consistency constraints across the network and enables the coherent integration of locally learned representations into a shared global structure. This formulation introduces an interpretable inductive bias that promotes alignment across base stations while preserving local geometric fidelity. Building on this model, we develop a multi-site channel charting architecture and an alternating optimization algorithm that jointly updates neural encoders and inter-site orthogonal transport maps, with theoretical guarantees on consistency. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating improved cross-site alignment without degrading the quality of local embeddings.

Ambient Internet-of-Things backscatter devices at known locations can act as low-cost passive anchors by creating geometrically anchored reflected paths in cellular networks. Unlike reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, practical backscatter devices are independently controlled and lack a common phase reference; their modulation signatures may be known, but their reflection gains and residual phases are generally uncalibrated. We study how much localization information survives this incomplete per-device calibration in uplink non-line-of-sight (NLOS) positioning, where the direct NLOS path and the backscatter-assisted paths share an unknown scatterer. Treating the common channel gain, the relative backscatter response, and the residual device phases as nuisance parameters, we derive closed-form equivalent Fisher information matrices for calibrated, partially calibrated, and fully uncalibrated operation. The analysis shows that unknown device phases remove carrier-phase information from the backscatter-assisted paths, whereas joint uncertainty in the common gain and relative response leaves the direct NLOS path with only bandwidth-dependent delay information. The resulting position-domain bounds show that device count alone is insufficient: the passive anchors must also observe the common scatterer from sufficiently diverse directions. For joint single-snapshot identification of the user equipment and scatterer, at least two devices in two dimensions and three in three dimensions are necessary. The results identify deployment implications for Ambient Internet-of-Things positioning and show which calibration losses also apply to separable subpanel-based reconfigurable-surface architectures.

Channel estimation in extra-large multiple-input multiple-output systems is challenging due to near-field propagation, where the array response depends on both the angle and distance of the propagation paths. Existing near-field channel estimation methods typically rely either on fixed angle-distance grids, which suffer from grid mismatch effects, or on multi-stage refinement procedures with increased computational complexity. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the dictionary-learning iterative soft-thresholding algorithm (DL-ISTA), a method for joint near-field dictionary learning and channel estimation based on the iterative soft-thresholding algorithm. The proposed method jointly estimates the sparse channel coefficients and the continuous angle-distance parameters through alternating optimization, thereby avoiding discretization errors associated with fixed grids. To promote robust convergence, the angle-distance parameters are initialized using Sobol sequences, which provide uniform coverage of the parameter space. Numerical results show that DL-ISTA outperforms a baseline with comparable computational complexity and attains comparable or better accuracy than a substantially more complex benchmark.

Standard chance-constrained spacecraft guidance typically relies on the assumption that uncertainties in vehicle states obey Gaussian statistics. In frontier applications such as the cislunar environment or deep space flybys, the dynamics can be particularly nonlinear, and time between measurements can be long, leading to the need to make decisions whose outcomes produce non-Gaussian distributions. This paper demonstrates a non-Gaussian confidence boundary technique for stochastic guidance in such applications. Our approach is to consider the true confidence contour as a perturbation of the one predicted from covariance, then to derive perturbed boundary geometry from computed higher-order statistical moments. Applying this technique to so-called "banana-shaped distributions", found in orbital mechanics problems, enables a simple parameterization of the confidence contour using the skew and kurtosis tensors. This parameterization is then applied to a stochastic and nonlinear impulsive spacecraft maneuver targeting problem, with special treatment of a relevant non-convex constraint.

Jamming and spoofing threaten wireless and satellite navigation by disrupting or manipulating radio frequency (RF) signals, undermining availability, integrity, and trust. Robust interference monitoring (i.e., detection, classification, characterization, and direction finding) is therefore essential to identify and localize anomalous signals. While machine learning (ML) promises improved performance in complex environments, its development and validation depend on large-scale datasets that capture realistic signal and channel variability. Collecting such data in the real world is difficult because intentional jamming is illegal and ground-truth attribution is confounded by propagation, hardware, and environmental effects. To address this gap, we create and publish S-ICDF, a large-scale indoor interference dataset generated with Sionna, a GPU-accelerated simulation library for physical-layer wireless communications. S-ICDF covers 102 interference configurations, including diverse antenna array patterns, bandwidths, and simulation settings such as noise level and reflection depth. We further provide baseline results by benchmarking S-ICDF with classical estimation and direction finding (DF) methods (MUSIC, ESPRIT, and CAPON) and with modern ML approaches. The dataset is publicly available at: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/sicdf_dataset

This paper introduces a novel direct data-driven control framework based on Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) to design interpretable and robust closed-loop policies without requiring explicit model identification. We propose two data-driven NGD formulations that incorporate the closed-loop covariance matrix through the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), allowing gradient updates to be preconditioned according to the system's intrinsic uncertainty. Leveraging two distinct data-based parameterizations of the closed-loop system, our method enables stability-guaranteed policy synthesis directly from data. We provide theoretical guarantees for contraction and convergence using semidefinite programs (SDPs) and validate our framework in both simulations and on hardware on a ROSbot XL platform. The results demonstrate intuitive features compared to linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) and standard data-driven baselines, particularly in terms of convergence speed, robustness, and control interpretability. This work bridges the gap between trajectory-oriented natural gradient methods and practical data-driven control design.

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), empowered by dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs), has emerged as a promising paradigm for next-generation wireless networks. However, existing DMA-based designs commonly rely on the frequency-flat response model for DMA elements, which is accurate only in narrowband scenarios and can cause significant phase and magnitude mismatches in wideband and ultra-wideband systems. This paper investigates a DMA-based wideband ISAC system under a frequency-selective Lorentzian response model, which accurately captures the frequency-dependent behavior of DMA elements. We aim to jointly balance the aggregate signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of communication users and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the radar target. To this end, we first develop an alternating optimization framework based on projected gradient ascent (PGA), deriving closed-form gradients of the objective function with respect to the digital beamforming vectors, resonance frequencies, and damping factors under the frequency-selective Lorentzian DMA model. We then propose an unfolded PGA architecture that preserves the interpretability of model-based optimization while learning key hyperparameters to accelerate convergence. Simulation results show that the frequency-selective Lorentzian model improves performance by approximately 20% over its frequency-flat approximation. Moreover, deep-unfolded PGA achieves up to 20-fold faster convergence and improves the objective value by up to 7% compared with PGA-based benchmarks.

Optimal power flow (OPF) solved by an interior-point method (IPM) requires repeatedly solving Newton linear systems. When variational quantum linear solvers (VQLS) are used, each IPM iteration involves an additional nested inner variational optimization loop, which can significantly slow the overall quantum-assisted IPM convergence. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a dual-level trainable quantum IPM framework for OPF that leverages early solver-generated trajectories rather than relying on single-point prediction. The key observation is that early IPM iterates provide informative primal-dual, slack, and barrier-variable evolution about the path to optimality, while early VQLS parameter updates provide useful information about the later variational search. At the quantum-solver level, a trainable parameter model uses a short prefix of the VQLS parameter trajectory to project the remaining variational search toward a lower-cost region. At the OPF-solver level, a second trainable model uses early primal-dual IPM iterates to project a later central path state, which is restored to an admissible point before IPM refinement continues. Simulation studies show that the proposed approach reduces the number of variational updates by up to $95\%$ while maintaining OPF objective values close to the classical IPM reference. A 2-bus demonstration on real quantum hardware is also included to validate the implementation of the proposed workflow.

Medical acoustic signals such as respiratory sounds, cardiac auscultations, and cough audio carry rich diagnostic information, yet no existing benchmark evaluates multimodal reasoning over their spectrogram representations. We address both gaps with CaReCoS, a benchmark pairing clinically grounded questions with mel-spectrogram images derived from seven medical audio datasets. Evaluating 9 state-of-the-art vision and omni models, we find that all struggle with fine-grained acoustic features encoded in spectrograms: no model reliably combines visual pattern recognition with medical knowledge, achieving a maximum accuracy of 51.2%, underscoring the need for training on medical sound visualizations.

Accurate channel estimation in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems remains challenging when demodulation reference signal (DMRS) observations are sparse and noisy, and when DMRS configurations vary across deployment scenarios. This paper proposes DANCE (Diffusion-based Noise-Adaptive Null-space Channel Estimation), a diffusion-based channel estimator for OFDM systems. We formulate DMRS-aided channel estimation as a sparse linear inverse problem whose measurement operator is induced by the pilot pattern. The resulting range-null space decomposition separates the measurement-constrained range-space component from the unobserved null-space component, which is reconstructed through a learned diffusion prior. To avoid directly imposing noisy pilot samples as exact constraints, DANCE introduces a noise-adaptive posterior correction into the reverse diffusion process. The correction coefficient and the residual sampling variance are jointly calibrated according to the observation noise level, thereby reducing pilot-noise injection while retaining useful measurement information. We further design a conditional U-Net denoiser for complex-valued OFDM channel grids, where the real and imaginary components are represented as separate feature channels and downsampling is performed only along the subcarrier dimension. Simulations based on 5G NR tapped delay line (TDL) and clustered delay line (CDL) channel models show that DANCE achieves consistently lower normalized mean squared error (NMSE) than conventional estimators and diffusion-based posterior sampling methods under different signal-to-noise ratios, DMRS configurations, Doppler frequency shifts, and train-test distribution mismatches.

Closed-loop (or feedback) error-state Kalman filters with their relatives and offspring are the state-of-the-art in modern aided inertial navigation research. Estimated inertial navigation system (INS) errors are continually fed back to the INS to correct the nominal system state before subsequent predictions. Conversely, in safety-critical aeronautical applications, open-loop (or feedforward) systems are an undisputed standard, where the inertial mechanization is strictly decoupled to allow for operational independence and fault isolation of computing units. We assess the performance impacts of this architectural choice beyond qualitative system-safety justifications using a standard inertial mechanization in geodetic coordinates and direct position aiding. Simulations using a variety of inertial sensor error characteristics, ranging from consumer to navigation grade systems, showcase the trade-off between smooth information fusion for high-end IMUs using an open-loop filter and the inherent long-term stability of the closed-loop architecture.

Eco-friendly energy management for artificial intelligence data centers (AIDCs) is crucial because of the significant increase in energy consumption-induced carbon emissions from AIDCs resulting from the rapid expansion of AI applications. This paper proposes a hierarchical carbon-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning (CA-MARL) framework for robust and efficient operations of AIDCs under uncertainties while ensuring low-carbon operation of power distribution systems. The framework comprises a workload manager (WM) agent and multiple local AIDC agents trained using a multi-agent transformer method, corresponding to a global AIDC aggregator and a local AIDC operator, respectively. Leveraging AIDC operation data along with nodal carbon intensity (NCI) calculated from the carbon emission flow-integrated distribution system operator problem, the WM agent spatially allocates AI training and inference jobs among all AIDCs. Based on the jobs allocated from the WM agent and NCI information, each AIDC agent schedules economical and eco-friendly operations of the AIDC by performing the following tasks: i) temporal shifting of training jobs, ii) spatial allocation of training graphics processing unit (GPU) blocks and inference GPUs within the AIDC, and iii) control of the supply air temperature of the cooling system. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was assessed using an IEEE 33-node power distribution system.

Reliable analysis of bird vocalisations in passive acoustic monitoring requires models handling multiple, imbalanced annotation targets. We extend BirdCallNet for joint species and call-type classification on the long-tailed WiWa dataset and investigate how task-loss balancing interacts with pretrained representations and adaptation depth. We evaluate four bird-domain encoders, ConvNeXtBS, EAT, BirdMAE, and ProtoCLR, with separate species and call-type heads under linear probing, attentive probing, and full fine-tuning. A manually tuned fixed objective is compared with homoscedastic uncertainty weighting and Dynamic Weight Averaging across all three adaptation regimes, while GradNorm is evaluated only under full fine-tuning. Results indicate that the factorised multi-task formulation yields the most consistent improvements over the combined single-task baseline for call-type recognition, while its effect on species recognition depends on the adaptation regime. Full fine-tuning is not consistently optimal: ConvNeXtBS achieves the highest mean species performance under linear probing, whereas BirdMAE provides the strongest call-type performance under attentive probing. Adaptive weighting benefits species recognition more consistently than call-type recognition. Uncertainty weighting is particularly effective for species recognition under attentive probing, whereas Dynamic Weight Averaging is generally stronger for the same task under full fine-tuning. GradNorm achieves competitive call-type performance for selected backbones but consistently underperforms other weighting strategies for species recognition and incurs higher computational and memory costs. Overall, the preferred loss-balancing strategy depends on the backbone, adaptation regime, and target task, while frozen-backbone adaptation can provide a more favourable performance-efficiency trade-off than end-to-end fine-tuning.

Real-time cardiac cine MRI enables visualization of the beating heart during free breathing, but severe undersampling and motion make reconstruction highly challenging. A central challenge for reconstruction is incorporating powerful priors of cardiac anatomy while remaining computationally efficient. We propose Piecewise Dynamic Diffusion Regularization (PDDR), a reconstruction method that integrates a spatiotemporal diffusion model as a generative prior within a variational reconstruction framework for cine MRI. The model employs dedicated spatial layers to encode anatomical structure and temporal layers to capture cardiac motion learned from gated cine data. PDDR leverages the dynamic prior in a piecewise manner, enabling the efficient use of spatiotemporal diffusion models for processing of long real-time sequences. Experiments on retrospectively accelerated and prospective real-time cine MRI demonstrate that PDDR outperforms classical, unsupervised, and diffusion-based methods, delivering high-quality reconstructions with substantially reduced computation time compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results highlight PDDR as a practical and scalable solution for free-breathing, real-time cardiac MRI. Code is available at https://github.com/MLI-lab/pddr.

Supervisory control synthesis leverages the nonblocking property to show liveness of the supervised system. This property is particularly weak when system models include fault behavior, reconfiguration, or multiple control goals. To capture a more suitable nonblocking property for such system models, this paper introduces modal and multimodal nonblocking. These novel nonblocking variants impose a restriction on the states visited on the path towards a marked state. Synthesis algorithms are presented to construct modal and multimodal nonblocking supervisors. The novel nonblocking variants are illustrated with three intuitive examples, inspired by real synthesis problems encountered while applying supervisory control synthesis to safety-critical water infrastructures. A comparison is made between the novel nonblocking variants and established nonblocking variants to show that they are distinct. Additionally, where possible, conditions are formulated under which one variant implies the other.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables intelligent wireless infrastructure but raises growing regulatory concern as fine-grained personal trajectory histories become a byproduct of sensing. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Articles 5(1)(c) and 5(1)(f) require that personal data be limited to what is necessary and protected through appropriate technical measures against unauthorised reconstruction. This paper addresses both requirements through a Fisher information density (FID)-constrained trajectory sharing scheme for robot collision avoidance, where sensing estimates are perturbed according to local information content before sharing. Experiments on real pedestrian traces show that FID-controlled sharing achieves a strictly better privacy-utility tradeoff than fixed-error perturbation: at matched missed-conflict rates, reconstruction leakage and sustained exposure lengths are consistently lower, establishing information-aware perturbation as a principled technical measure aligned with GDPR data minimisation and integrity requirements.

Unknown linear time-varying (LTV) systems require the control policy to adapt from online closed-loop data as dynamics evolve. Existing methods usually update the policy by solving a one-shot optimization problem, which can be computationally demanding and sensitive to noisy model estimates. In this paper, we propose a policy gradient adaptive control (PGAC) method for LTV system control with unknown model parameters. Specifically, PGAC integrates online policy optimization into feedback by updating the state-feedback policy with one-step gradient descent of the linear quadratic regulator cost at each time instant. This incremental update is computationally light and naturally limits policy variations caused by noisy data. To explicitly compute the policy gradient online, we estimate local models from recent closed-loop trajectories using normalized sliding-window least-squares. We provide stability and convergence certificates of PGAC for two classes of LTV systems. For slowly time-varying systems, we prove that the closed-loop system achieves practical exponential stability without a dwell-time condition. For piecewise-constant LTV systems, we establish practical stability through a dwell-time contraction argument. We also provide average frozen-time optimality-gap bounds of the policy sequence for both classes. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our method via numerical case studies of both LTV and nonlinear systems.

Sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks are expected to serve as AI-native infrastructure, transmitting meaning rather than mere bits – a shift that makes semantic communication the central paradigm for next-generation connectivity. Deep learning-based semantic encoders show compelling gains in bandwidth efficiency; however, their dependence on large transformer models with hundreds of millions of parameters is at odds with the sub-millisecond latency, microjoule energy budgets, and kilobyte memory footprints of the constrained IoT and edge devices that will dominate 6G endpoints. Tiny language models (t-LMs) – compact, quantised, task-specialised models deployable on microcontrollers, mobile system-on-chips, and edge accelerators – are the enabling technology for closing this gap. This review provides a unified treatment of (i) the theoretical foundations of semantic information, covering semantic entropy, channel capacity, and rate-distortion theory; (ii) a two-axis taxonomy of t-LM-based semantic communication systems across five architecture classes and six compression paradigms; (iii) a survey of model compression techniques – quantisation, pruning, knowledge distillation, low-rank adaptation, split computing, and neural architecture search – through the lens of semantic quality preservation; and (iv) semantic-aware resource allocation frameworks for 6G multi-user networks. Evidence across the surveyed literature shows that compression can reduce semantic encoder size by up to 99.98% while preserving task accuracy, that split computing achieves device-side encoders with as few as 640 parameters, and that knowledge graph integration cuts transmission energy by 65%. Seven open challenges are identified, spanning theoretical gaps, system design, knowledge-base management, post-quantum security, and hardware co-design, with a 3GPP standardisation roadmap toward IMT-2030.

Near-field integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) can deliver the high spatial resolution and transmission capability with the shared spectrum and hardware. Due to the partial overlap between communication scatterers and radar targets, the sensing information can provide valuable priors to enhance the channel estimation while fusing the two heterogeneous modalities remain challenging. To address this problem, a Cross-Attention Transformer based Channel Estimation Neural Network (CAT-CENet) is developed, which includes a communication pilot branch generating the the Key and Value features and a sensing information branch generating the Query feature. By elaborating the three-module structure, CAT-CENet can focus on features of overlapped targets automatically without need of identifying them in advance. The modality contribution is theoretically analyzed based on the Shapley value to verify the cross-attention gain achieved by CAT-CENet. Simulation results show that CAT-CENet outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes, especially with the higher overlapping proportion, and is robust to the model pruning.

Bird species classification from field recordings remains challenging due to overlapping vocalizations and incomplete species labels. We study source separation as a preprocessing for bird species classification to improve multi-species detection. Specifically, we employ an ensemble of two separators, FTRNN and TF-Locoformer, both trained with mixture invariant training (MixIT). To address the false positive gain caused by separation errors in separated outputs, we propose mixture-constrained max pooling (MCM), which clips the predicted probability from each separated channel based on the corresponding species probability in the original mixture. The classifier is applied to each separated output and the original mixture independently, and MCM aggregates the predictions into a final per-species probability. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that the ensemble outperforms individual separators and MCM outperforms standard max pooling across multiple metrics, and reveal that separation leads to both true positive gain for present species and false positive gain for absent species.

Global navigation systems require state estimation algorithms that handle Earth's curvature, Earth's rotation, and gravitational variations. These factors can typically be neglected in local navigation algorithms for robots, drones, etc. In classical error-state Kalman Filtering (ESKF) the error state dynamics are trajectory-dependent. Invariant ESKFs utilize Lie Group symmetries to represent the error, which can render error propagation trajectory-independent for group-affine systems. Choosing between a standard filter (where position and velocity errors are defined additively in the navigation frame), a left-invariant filter (where errors are represented in the body frame) and a right-invariant filter (where errors are represented in the navigation/world frame) depends on system dynamics and sensor configuration. This note presents the mathematical formulas for four classical and invariant ESKFs for globally applicable aided inertial navigation systems. It is intended to serve as a systematic reference for comparison and implementation.

Weakly supervised segmentation of co-occurring neuroimaging lesion subclasses remains challenging due to overlapping activations, noisy pseudo-labels, and the absence of explicit inter-class exclusivity constraints. We propose BiMEx-MS (Binary-guided Mutually Exclusive Multiclass Segmentation), a framework that decomposes multiclass segmentation into whole-lesion localization and exclusive class assignment: a binary localization module provides a class-frequency-agnostic structural prior confining multiclass predictions within the detected lesion domain, while a multi-exit classification architecture with supervised contrastive pretraining produces multi-scale class-discriminative activation maps aggregated via a class-specific attention network. Inter-class exclusivity is enforced through a tri-partite loss comprising per-class separation, inter-class orthogonality, and binary-multiclass spatial consensus, followed by hierarchical morphological pseudo-label refinement. Evaluated across brain tumor MRI (BraTS 2020, BraTS 2023 SSA) and intracranial hemorrhage CT (RSNA-ICH to BHSD) against sixteen weakly supervised baselines, BiMEx-MS achieves Edema HD95 of 29.56 mm (the only method below 40 mm) and subdural hemorrhage Dice of 0.704, with gains consistently largest on boundary metrics and rare subtypes. Cross-dataset generalization, backbone ablations across six architectures, and uncertainty quantification confirm that structural guidance rather than model capacity drives performance. Code: https://github.com/ashutoshkr45/BiMEx-MS-Neuro.