Papers

This paper employs extreme value theory to establish the asymptotic distribution of the $k$-th maximum order statistics of signal to noise ratio (SNR) for a $\kappa-\mu$ fading channel with independent and non-identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) parameters. Since $\kappa-\mu$ encompasses well-known distributions such as Rice, Rayleigh, and Nakagami-m, the order statistics for these are also derived as special cases. We demonstrate the practical significance of our results by showcasing their applicability in several applications, including antenna selection in MIMO systems, backscatter systems, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and UAV-assisted relay selection systems. Furthermore, by utilizing the $k$-th maximum order statistics, we derive expressions for outage probability and average throughput of $k$-th maximum order statistics. Comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations are carried out to verify the accuracy of the proposed results.

DCASE~2026 Task~5 introduces Audio-Dependent Question Answering (ADQA), which tests whether large audio-language models answer from the audio rather than from textual priors. An Audio-Dependency Filtering (ADF) pipeline combines silent-audio probing, per-option perplexity, a large language model (LLM) commonsense check, and human review to remove items solvable from text alone. The 3000 items that pass form the ADQA-Bench evaluation set, spanning music, speech, and environmental audio. The inaugural edition draws 14 teams and 36 submissions across two tracks defined by total parameter count (up to 100B and under 10B). A Chung-Ang University ensemble of MOSS-Audio-8B-Thinking and Qwen3-Omni-30B reaches the top overall accuracy at \pct{58.33}, and a MOSS-only configuration from the same team leads the sub-10B track at \pct{57.30}. Across the 30 submissions with a comparable development score, evaluation accuracy falls by 11.91 percentage points (pp) on average (median 10.91\,pp) on the hidden evaluation split, which is designed to be harder than the development split. The most common building blocks are: the MOSS-Audio-8B-Thinking backbone (13 of 36 submissions), Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on AudioMCQ-StrongAC, and preference or reinforcement-learning objectives – Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in five teams, Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO) in two. At test time, prompt engineering is near-universal, and majority or choice-permutation voting is common. Every system misses the same set of 233 evaluation items.

A popular route to interpretable zero-shot classification asks a large language model (LLM) to describe each class name and prompts CLIP with the resulting descriptors. We show that these descriptors carry little visual evidence of their own: removing the class name from the prompt collapses ImageNet accuracy from 59.5% to 15.5%. The diagnosis is that the descriptors are conditioned on the label rather than on the images, so they describe the concept in general and mislead exactly when the data shifts; an LLM insists that strawberries are red, but every strawberry in ImageNet-Sketch is a colorless line drawing. We therefore select attributes from the target image collection instead: we score a large attribute pool against the images in CLIP's joint embedding space and keep the top-scoring attributes per class. Selected this way, class-name-free attribute prompts reach 23.8% on ImageNet (against 15.5% for LLM descriptors), the gain holds on four shifted ImageNet variants, and reselecting from the LLM's own pool isolates the selection mechanism as the cause. With one image per class, the selected attributes outperform the prompt-tuning method CoOp by 3 points while fitting in under a minute instead of 14 hours, with no learned soft prompt to obscure the decision. Because the attribute set is chosen by the data, it doubles as a readable summary of a dataset, which we use to describe distribution shift in words. Our code and results are available on our project page: https://ggare-cmu.github.io/AttributeSelect/

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) enables frequency-domain reconstruction of the distributed Rayleigh backscatter channel in coherent distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), but an explicitly transmitted cyclic prefix (CP) lengthens the probing period and reduces the slow-time Nyquist limit of each range cell. We investigate a repeated cyclic-prefix-free OFDM waveform for DAS, in which the tail of the preceding useful block serves as a virtual cyclic extension. A finite-memory range condition for tail-reuse reconstruction is derived, and circular folding is identified when the useful period is shorter than the channel memory. For fixed useful-block length and fiber memory, removing the explicit CP increases the period-limited highest unaliased vibration frequency without changing the occupied-bandwidth-limited spatial resolution. In a 5.2-km numerical configuration, a 75-MSa/s processing rate and a 4096-sample useful block give a 54.61-us probing period and a 9.16-kHz slow-time Nyquist limit. Simulations verify tail reuse, the predicted folding boundary, and recovery of 100 vibration events from 800 Hz to 8800 Hz. Bandwidth-scaling simulations further show that joint processing of fine spatial observations improves differential-phase reliability and reconstruction SNR at a fixed reporting interval. Experiments on a 5.2-km coherent DAS link with 111.984-MHz occupied OFDM bandwidth blindly localize 500-Hz and 3-kHz PZT-induced vibrations at 5063.7 m and 5070.1 m, respectively, and recover their waveforms and spectra. The results demonstrate feasible tail-reuse channel reconstruction and quantify the extension of the unaliased vibration bandwidth.

Networked integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) offers significant potential for next-generation wireless systems. By exploiting spatial diversity through the cooperation of multiple base stations (BSs), this architecture expands coverage and achieves enhanced sensing performance. However, accurate sensing in networked ISAC requires time-frequency synchronization among BSs. Existing synchronization methods for networked ISAC suffer from inter-path interference caused by sensing channel compression. To address this problem, this paper proposes a structured canonical polyadic decomposition (SCPD) algorithm that effectively separates the multipath components of the sensing channel. Benefiting from this separation, SCPD achieves joint network-level synchronization and multi-target parameter estimation. We establish theoretical identifiability conditions for SCPD and show that it asymptotically achieves the Cramér-Rao bound. Furthermore, by incorporating parameters estimated from different BS pairs, we propose a multi-target tracking algorithm designed for the continuous operation of the system. The proposed algorithm tracks both the trajectories and velocities of moving targets by leveraging geometric diversity. Utilizing tracking results from the previous snapshot, an adaptive beamforming scheme is also developed to improve tracking performance in the next snapshot. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve superior accuracy and outlier robustness for both synchronization and sensing in networked ISAC, outperforming traditional approaches.

In multiuser unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted downlink communications, UAV placement and transmit beamforming are inherently coupled through the propagation geometry. However, fully joint design based on instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is impractical, because the small-scale fading depends on the UAV location to be optimized and thus is unavailable a priori. Moreover, existing joint placement and beamforming methods do not explicitly optimize the UAV position with respect to the geometry-dependent multiuser interference induced by inter-user steering correlation. To address this issue, we propose a correlation-aware geometric framework for joint UAV placement and beamforming. Specifically, the UAV position is first optimized based on long-term channel statistics, where the steering-vector correlation is incorporated into the placement design through a conservative Gaussian surrogate that avoids interference underestimation. The resulting nonconvex positioning problem is then handled using successive convex approximation, auxiliary-variable decoupling, and quadratic transform techniques. For the obtained UAV location, the transmit beamformer is then optimized using instantaneous CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed framework significantly improves the minimum user spectral efficiency by enhancing angular separability among users and reducing inter-user interference. These results demonstrate that UAV placement should be designed not only for desired-link enhancement but also for interference mitigation through geometry-aware user separation.

Defensive driving is widely recognized as an advanced driving skill. However, whether and how defensive driving affects driving safety remains insufficiently investigated. This study examines the behavioral characteristics of defensive driving, its impact on driving safety, and the underlying mechanisms. First, defensive driving is defined regarding operational timing and application scenario. Then, 82 participants are recruited for driving simulator experiments, with their behavioral and eye movement data being collected. Following the experiments, participants are categorized into groups based on the frequency of defensive driving behaviors exhibited. Finally, both inter-group and inter trial comparisons are performed on the experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate that in the inter-group comparison, the high defensive driving capability group exhibits higher acceleration and deceleration magnitudes, lower average speeds, and larger average absolute yaw angles compared to the low capability group, alongside shorter fixation durations and reduced fixation frequencies. Moreover, we observe that these participants tend to initiate defensive or evasive actions earlier, resulting in lower scenario risk. Regarding the inter-trial comparison, we observe similar trends exclusively in the low capability group, whereas most metrics show no significant differences between Trial 1 and Trial 2 in the high capability group. These results reveal that drivers possessing defensive driving capabilities tend to execute more intense driving maneuvers and identify risks and take action earlier, thereby enhancing driving safety. Findings support the promotion of defensive driving and provide a basis for relevant training programs. Meanwhile, they offer insights for the training of autonomous driving algorithms with defensive driving capabilities.

Given observations $\mathbf x=(x_1,\dots,x_n)$, Gaffke (2005) defined \[ K_n(\mathbf x)=\mathbb{P}_{\mathbf D}\!\left\{\sum_{i=1}^n x_iD_i\le 1\right\}, \qquad (D_0,D_1,\ldots,D_n)\sim\mathrm{Dirichlet}(1,\ldots,1), \] and conjectured that it is a $p$-value whenever the inputs are independent e-values. Recently, Vlassis and Thomas (2026) proved this conjecture. Inverting the tests for observations in $[0,1]$ gives the confidence interval studied by Learned-Miller and Thomas (2020), which reduces to Clopper–Pearson for Bernoulli data. We give a finite- and large-sample account of Gaffke's test and interval. First, for every $\mathbf x\in[0,\infty)^n$ and every elementary symmetric polynomial $e_k$, \( K_n(\mathbf x)e_k(\mathbf x)\le {n\choose k}, \) so the Gaffke $p$-value never larger than the SymPol $p$-value of Ming et al. (2026). However, Gaffke's p-value is inadmissible. For $n=2$, we construct a valid rule that is strictly smaller on mixed configurations and is the unique admissible rule that dominates $K_2$. A neutral-face extension proves inadmissibility of $K_n$ for every $n\ge2$. If one independent uniform random variable is allowed, there is an even simpler full-dimensional improvement: on the upper orthant, where $K_n(\mathbf x)=1/\prod_i x_i$, replace it by $U/\prod_i x_i$. The equal-tail Gaffke confidence interval $I_n$ is nevertheless first-order asymptotically efficient: for iid observations on $[0,1]$ with unknown variance $\sigma^2>0$, \[ \sqrt n\,\operatorname{Width}(I_n)\longrightarrow 2\sigma z_{1-\alpha/2}\qquad\text{almost surely}. \] Our simulations also find that, among a variety of bounded-mean intervals considered, the Gaffke interval is the shortest, including comparisons with a recent empirical Berry–Esseen procedure having the same first-order Gaussian target.

Multi-channel speech enhancement (SE) systems exhibit superior performance over single-channel methods but are constrained to fixed microphone array configurations. This restricts their real-world deployment across devices with diverse array geometries. While recent array-agnostic SE methods address variable microphone numbers and permutations, they largely fail to exploit explicit array geometry priors when available, missing a crucial cue for optimal spatial filtering. A Geometry-Aware Dynamic Convolution (Geo-DConv) framework is proposed, which explicitly leverages microphone coordinates to transform standard fixed-array SE models into robust array-invariant systems. Experiments are conducted on the recent real-recorded RealMAN multi-channel speech dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed architecture enables two widely used fixed-array models to adapt to array-invariant settings, with consistent performance improvements across diverse array topologies.

High penetrations of variable renewable energy introduce significant resource adequacy challenges, particularly when weather-driven uncertainty affects renewable availability, electricity demand, and the effective capacity of thermal generators. Existing capacity credit accreditation methods often neglect these correlated weather effects, which may overstate firm capacity, distort long-term investment decisions, and weaken reliability outcomes in electricity market with price caps. This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic optimization framework for capacity accreditation that explicitly captures uncertainty in wind, solar, and temperature-dependent thermal derating. Using five years of ERCOT demand and renewable availability data, we compare the proposed stochastic capacity credit method with deterministic and average accreditation approaches, and quantify the impact of alternative accreditation methods on reliability, investment incentives, and the value of weather information. The results show that incorporating weather uncertainty yields more informative capacity credits and more reliable investment signals. In contrast, deterministic and averaged approaches can distort resource expansion decisions and produce materially worse reliability outcomes. These findings demonstrate the importance of explicitly accounting for weather uncertainty in capacity accreditation and long-term resource adequacy planning.

Distributed learning systems typically assume that local data is already available at clients with fixed quality, while in practice, data is sensed through imperfect physical processes whose quality depends on modality, resolution, sensing power, and sample size. We model sensing noise as a structured, modality-dependent covariance and derive a non-convex learning convergence bound whose irreducible sensing floor is governed by the alignment between the modality noise covariance and the loss-sensitivity geometry. Thus, the optimal modality minimizes this noise-gradient alignment rather than total noise power alone. The analysis further yields a sensor-hardware achievability bound for epsilon-stationarity and a hardware-saturation threshold on the accumulated dataset size. We jointly optimize modality, resolution, power, and sample count and demonstrate the performance gain through simulations.

Data-aided channel estimation enhances spectral efficiency by reusing detected symbols as virtual pilots. In this process, selecting only reliable symbols is crucial to prevent misdetected symbols from corrupting the channel estimate. However, conventional methods rely exclusively on physical-layer statistics. Beyond physical-layer information, transmitted payloads possess inherent semantic structures that can be exploited to resolve detection errors. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic-aware channel estimation framework for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems that utilizes a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to perform reliable symbol selection and correction based on semantic information. The framework employs a two-layer mechanism: one layer selects reliable decoded symbols through semantic verification, while the other selects accurately LLM-corrected symbols by cross-validating them against the received signal using physical-layer information. We prove that corrected symbols yield a strictly larger expected reduction in estimation error than initially correctly decoded symbols. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms conventional data-aided schemes in both normalized mean squared error and bit error rate, closely approaching the performance of an oracle estimator.

We propose a chaos-inspired new architecture for EMG-to-Speech (ETS) synthesis called CS-ETS, which combines a Samba-based encoder with two novel chaos-inspired loss functions – Lyapunov Exponent Regularization (LER) and Multi-Scale Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MSDFA). LER is designed based on Lyapunov exponents to capture nonlinear fluctuations and sensitivity to initial conditions. MSDFA exploits detrended fluctuation analysis to quantify fractal-like, long-range temporal chaotic correlation. CS-ETS surpasses prior work with a 40.79% lower parameter count (32M vs 54.1M) and introduces a new Post-Vocoder Alignment approach that improves LSD by 2.1x, STOI by 4.7x, and SI-SDR by 1.25x. CS-ETS reduces computation by 13.33% while maintaining improved performance. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we show how ETS can be supervised by the subtle non-linear chaotic physics with Samba attention to achieve a significantly smaller model with superior performance.

The deployment of high-speed Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 3D aerial highways necessitates robust coordination of physical flight kinematics and multi-tier network handovers. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers rapid tactical control, it lacks the zero-shot strategic reasoning required to quickly adapt to dynamic Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks (ITNTNs). Conversely, Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at semantic reasoning but suffer from high inference latency, rendering them unsuitable for real-time aerodynamic control. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Hierarchical LLM-driven control framework. A massive cloud-based LLM deployed on a High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) manages slow-timescale global load balancing, while lightweight edge-LLMs on individual UAVs translate local observations into tactical sub-goals. These sub-goals guide a fast-timescale physical DRL controller to execute collision-free, handover-aware trajectories. Simulation results demonstrate that our agentic architecture significantly reduces collision rates and improves aggregate system throughput compared to existing baselines.

In medical imaging, developing robust deep learning models requires data from various domains. However, regulatory policies protecting patient privacy restrict data sharing. Federated learning (FL) addresses this by enabling collaborative model training without centralizing data. Yet, data heterogeneity across client centers requires personalized models to enhance performance. Clients with limited resources may struggle to efficiently train or deploy large deep neural networks. Adaptive model pruning tackles both challenges by reducing model size while enabling personalized FL adaptation. Although research has investigated adaptive pruning methods in FL, their effectiveness on dense prediction tasks like segmentation remains unexplored. To address this gap, we propose Activation Statistics-driven structured Adaptive Pruning (FedASAP), which uses activation-based features to guide filter removal for each client. By learning a lightweight classifier on per-filter activation statistics, FedASAP refines importance-score rankings and produces compact, personalized segmentation models in heterogeneous federated settings. Our results show the approach's effectiveness by achieving better Dice scores of 0.796 and 0.743, than state-of-the-art, while reducing parameter count by 45% and 73% on two multi-centric brain pathology segmentation datasets: Federated Tumour Segmentation (FeTS) and White Matter Hyperintensities (WMH), respectively.

In this paper, we propose to use a novel reconfigurable holographic surface (RHS) to improve the performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) by exploiting the additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) enabled by the holographic interference principle. Specifically, we study an RHS-empowered SWIPT system in which the digital beamformer at the base station (BS) and the holographic beamformer at the RHS are jointly optimized to maximize the weighted sum-rate of information-decoding (ID) users while guaranteeing a minimum harvested energy requirement for each energy-harvesting (EH) user. Due to the non-convexity of the optimization problem, the weighted sum-rate maximization problem is challenging to solve. We first adopt the weighted minimum mean squared error (WMMSE) method to transform the objective into a more tractable form. We then develop an iterative optimization framework, where the BS digital beamforming and the RHS holographic beamforming subproblems are solved via the majorization-minimization (MM) method. Since solving each subproblem can incur prohibitive complexity as the variable dimension increases, we further propose low-complexity solutions for the two subproblems based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) methodology. Numerical results validate the convergence behavior of the proposed algorithms and demonstrate that the RHS-aided BS achieves significant performance gains over a conventional fully-digital BS benchmark. Moreover, the proposed low-complexity algorithms substantially reduce computational complexity while maintaining nearly the same performance.

Time-scale modification (TSM) has a number of open-source implementations, but these are designed almost exclusively for offline use, in which a recording is processed at a fixed rate and written out ahead of time. Applications such as automatic musical accompaniment require a different setting, which we call variable-rate playback: the recording to be stretched is known in advance, but the playback rate is not, and must change continuously in response to a live performer. The few implementations that generate output in real time are written in C++ and optimized for speed rather than for ease of modification, experimentation, and integration with the primarily Python-based research ecosystem. This paper describes a Python implementation of the widely used harmonic-percussive TSM method for the variable-rate playback setting. Harmonic-percussive separation is performed offline as a preprocessing step on the known input recording, while synthesis and playback are carried out in real time with a time-scale factor that may change at every frame. We further propose a family of variants that reduce runtime by replacing the phase vocoder's analysis-stage FFT and instantaneous frequency calculations with lookups into precomputed tables. Subjective listening tests with 24 participants (1114 pairwise ratings) show that these approximations become perceptually indistinguishable from the exact implementation once the precomputed hop size is sufficiently small, while reducing total runtime by roughly half. We characterize the resulting tradeoffs among precomputation, runtime, memory, and perceptual quality to guide algorithm selection, and we release our implementation as an open-source package.

A line-scanning lidar yields range and azimuth values in a fixed plane. To perceive surrounding objects in 3D, there must be relative motion between the lidar plane and the object. Thus, using a rotating base-platform is promising for industrial applications where objects need to be scanned or inspected precisely, and is the main focus of this work. In the rotary platform setup, a 3D point cloud of an object can be constructed if the axis of rotation and the precise motion about that axis are known. However, this setup gives rise to the following problem: how can the axis of rotation of the platform be accurately identified with respect to the lidar coordinate system? It is referred to as the calibration problem in the robotics community. Any inaccuracy in this transformation directly affects the quality of the reconstructed point cloud, leading to misrepresentation of the object of interest. In this work, we explore automated approaches to statically and dynamically estimate the transformation of a rotary platform's axis of rotation with respect to a static line-scanning lidar. The proposed algorithms have been validated on real-world datasets obtained from a custom made rotary platform and an FMCW lidar, and their convergence characteristics are studied for various initial conditions.

Eco-Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (Eco-CACC) systems rely on accurate localization, signal timing, and interaction awareness to optimize energy consumption at signalized intersections. Existing approaches typically assume that the internal world model used for optimization remains valid, making them vulnerable when sensing outages or semantic inconsistencies invalidate planning premises. This letter proposes an Integrity-Gated Eco-CACC framework that explicitly monitors the consistency between internal vehicle beliefs and external sensing. A unified integrity metric is constructed by combining positional innovation, observability loss, and semantic inconsistencies. The resulting trust score regulates control authority, enabling a transition between nominal eco-driving and a safety-dominant fallback maneuver. Unlike robust control methods that attempt to preserve performance under uncertainty, the proposed framework regulates whether energy-optimal control remains admissible. Scenario-based simulations demonstrate that the method preserves nominal efficiency when model consistency is maintained, while enabling early and conservative responses under integrity degradation.

Agentic artificial intelligence systems, capable of autonomous perception, planning, tool use, and multi-step action, are increasingly proposed for critical engineering domains where decisions carry physical, operational, or economic consequences. This survey addresses a gap in current literature by treating trustworthiness, whether agentic behavior can be verified, audited, and trusted under the constraints that engineering practice actually requires, as a first-class engineering property, rather than evaluating agentic AI by task capability alone. The study adopts a trustworthiness model organized around five cross-cutting dimensions: safety and constraint satisfaction; robustness and reliability; transparency and interpretability; accountability and auditability; and privacy and security. This is mapped onto an agentic assurance workflow spanning perception through audit. Building on this foundation, agentic systems architectures, threats, concrete trust mechanisms, and quantitative metrics are surveyed for direct application in agentic systems development and evaluation. These principles are then examined across four constraint-bound engineering domains: power systems, autonomous vehicles/robotics/UAVs, high-performance computing, and communication networks, identifying recurring design patterns, shared failure modes, and domain-specific gaps. Synthesizing across those domains, agentic AI trustworthiness is shown to be a single problem, with a path outlined toward a reusable, cross-domain assurance framework analogous to the graded certification regimes used by mature safety-critical engineering fields.

This article develops a large-signal stability analysis for a sampled-data optimization-based secondary controller for distributed energy resources (DERs) in power systems. The induced closed loop combines nonlinear inverter power-flow dynamics, filtered active and reactive power measurements, constrained optimization updates, and interpolation-based actuation between sampling instants. We study this optimization-in-the-loop nonlinear sampled-data system beyond local linearization. The analysis provides computable bounds on the voltage, filtered reactive power, and the secondary control input. We further characterize steady-state operating points and establish how the optimizer objectives and constraints connect voltage regulation with equal per-unitized reactive power sharing. Finally, input-to-state stability of the frequency dynamics is established with respect to DER voltages and control inputs. These results provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for sampled-data optimization-based secondary control of DERs.

Reinforcement learning (RL) research has demonstrated success in both physical and simulated domains; however, the predominant methodology remains rooted in simulations. The predominance of simulations makes translating research to physical reality uncertain for both algorithms and researchers. We propose a physical platform that is designed to simplify the transition. In this paper, we present the Open Ant: a physical variant of the commonly used Gymnasium Ant environment, along with a simulation. We demonstrate that competent walking policies can be learned from scratch in approximately one hour directly from the physical robot's experience for two substantially different RL algorithms: SARSA($\lambda$) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). Separately, we show policies that were learned in simulation transfer to reality. We also examine how well the platform supports a nimble experimental ecosystem. Specifically, we observe the speed with which new users from diverse backgrounds achieve their first success with the platform, and how easily the platform can be repaired and updated when hardware issues arise. Both the hardware design and software are available as open-source on GitHub for ease of customization. In summary, we advocate for the use of the Open Ant for RL researchers who frequently use simulated environments, so they can more easily include robot experiments in their evaluations.

The digital substrate - data, algorithms, infrastructure, platforms, applications - is being governed without adequate conceptual foundations. The ability and legitimacy required to govern this substrate, and to govern with it, are simultaneously misaligned, contested, and structurally absent. We introduce digital statecraft as the organising concept for this emerging field, arguing that 'digital' reconstitutes the statecraft question rather than merely extending its domain. The concept operates on two dimensions - statecraft over digital systems, concerning the authority and capacity of the state in relation to the digital substrate itself, and statecraft with digital systems, concerning the deployment of algorithmic tools as instruments of governing authority. And it rests on two foundational requirements, technical coherence and legitimate authority, that are genuinely in tension. We derive ten principles of digital statecraft from these foundations, each naming a condition whose absence produces an identifiable and structural governance failure: public interest first, human-machine complementarity, governability by design, systemic coherence, hybrid institutions, adaptive governance, human centricity and civic agency, accountable and traceable authority, judgment across time, and the non-delegable core. This article takes the state as the starting point, the institutional form that developed historically in response to the problem of effective and legitimate public governance, and the only current candidate for which the full set of legitimacy conditions is institutionally available. But the digital statecraft programme holds open a deeper question than just whether states can reform themselves: governing well in the algorithmic age may require rethinking the boundaries, scale, and affiliative basis of statehood itself.

We address optimal link scheduling in large-scale wireless networks. The goal is to schedule transmissions over a time horizon so that to maximize sum rate while ensuring that average rates of each customer attain a minimum rate requirement. To this end, we formulate a constrained optimization problem and solve it using Lagrangian duality. Common primal-dual approaches lead to time invariant policies. Our constraint requires all links transmit a fraction of the time while avoiding interference, which calls for time-varying policies across time slots. We propose an iterative algorithm to sample optimal sequences of schedules and dual variables. The scheduling decisions are parameterized using a Graph Neural Network. We incorporate state-augmentation techniques to learn said parameterization, introducing dual variables as dynamic inputs to the policy. This augmentation enables the GNN to adapt scheduling decisions over time, balancing constraint satisfaction with performance maximization. We validate our approach through extensive numerical simulations, benchmarking against several baselines and considering varying constraint levels.

The blind mitigation of inter-symbol interference in additive white impulsive noise modeled by a symmetric $\alpha$-stable (S$\alpha$S) distribution is investigated. A novel logarithmic product fractional-moment statistics (LP-FMS) criterion is proposed by combining complementary fractional-moment statistics with logarithmic normalization in a constrained optimization framework. Based on this criterion, a normalized blind equalization algorithm for symmetric alpha-stable noise (NBEA-SAS) is derived using stochastic gradient ascent with recursive fractional-moment estimation and Bussgang-consistent constrained adaptation. Simulation results for $64$-APSK signaling over fractionally spaced multipath microwave channels show that the proposed algorithm converges faster than FLOS-CMA, RAW-CMA, and NBEA-GG while achieving a comparable steady-state residual intersymbol interference floor under both moderately and highly impulsive S$\alpha$S noise conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed LP-FMS criterion provides a robust framework for blind adaptive equalization in impulsive noise environments.

Antennas transmit information wirelessly from one location to another via electromagnetic waves. Miniaturizing them, however, is challenging since the radiation efficiencies of all traditional antennas, based on the principles of classical electromagnetics, plummet when their dimensions are shrunk to tiny fractions of the radiated wavelength. Lately, a new generation of antennas whose operations are underpinned by non-classical principles have been demonstrated and they can overcome this limitation. This enables embedded applications that were hitherto inaccessible. In addition, beam steering, which normally requires a large phased array (multiple antenna elements each much larger than the wavelength), can now be accomplished with a single element much smaller than the wavelength. Some of these antennas also have stealth attributes for secure and covert communication, which makes this new genre a disruptive new technology.

The Hopfield network established that static memories can be stored as energy minima of a recurrent dynamical system, yet real intelligent agents must navigate sequences of memories rather than isolated snapshots.Biological cortex addresses this through a separation of timescales: fast synaptic dynamics encode individual states while slow neuromodulatory processes govern transitions between them. Inspired by this multi-timescale organization, we propose a sequential memory architecture that is fully continuous, admits exponential storage capacity, and is learnable in the sense that the transition structure is carried by a separate routing matrix – decoupled from the stored patterns, driven by the input context, and free to be chosen, optimized, or learned from data rather than hard-wired into the memory substrate. Specifically, we construct an autonomous three-timescale dynamical system with three coupled layers: a fast Kuramoto layer that stores phase patterns as exponentially stable phase-locked configurations, an intermediate hysteresis layer that enforces reliable dwell times, and a slow attention layer that routes sequential transitions. We provide a complete theoretical analysis of the stability and robustness of each layer, and we validate the full system through numerical simulations of sequential memory retrieval.

$\texttt{codesign-mcdp}$ is a Python library for formulating and solving $\textit{Monotone Co-Design Problems}$ (MCDPs) in the framework of Censi (2015). A design problem is a relation between two posets, a functionality poset $F$ and a resource poset $R$; given a target functionality, the problem asks for the antichain of minimal resources needed to deliver it. Design problems compose under three operators (series, parallel, feedback), and the resulting class is closed under composition. The library implements the antichain calculus, six primitive design-problem types, the three composition operators, a Kleene fixed-point solver, and two high-level builders (an MCDPL-style declarative builder and a modular $\texttt{System}$ builder). Further layers add set-based and stochastic uncertainty, compositional online learning, and temporal, vector-state, and online co-design, alongside a suite of worked examples.

Reinforcement learning (RL) for legged robots is advancing locomotion, demonstrating its ability to adapt to new and challenging terrain. Traditionally, these RL locomotion frameworks are position-based, making the policy less adaptable to terrain types and requiring state estimation techniques in the observation space, i.e., linear velocity. Moreover, these RL frameworks often use small, lightweight quadrupeds that are limited in their viability for high-complexity tasks due to hardware constraints. This work explores an RL torque control framework for heavyweight high-torque quadrupeds. The RL framework in this paper can traverse rough terrain and effectively track a desired linear velocity without requiring knowledge of the agent's current velocity. Using Nvidia's Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, simulation results of the RL torque control policy are shown on the Unitree B1 quadruped, achieving speeds of 3.5 m/s and 1.5 rad/s. In addition, the quadruped can walk up and down stairs without the aid of an exteroceptive sensor.

Wireless physical neural networks (WPNNs) embed neural computation directly into analog hardware, offering lower energy consumption and latency than conventional digital implementations. In this paper, we propose a deep WPNN in which nonlinear activations are realized by a multi-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay network, in which each relay implements a trainable complex linear gain and bias, followed by the power amplifier's intrinsic nonlinearity acting as an activation function. The cascade of multiple relays therefore realizes an over-the-air fully connected network whose parameters can be trained end-to-end. We develop two transceiver designs for different channel state information (CSI) availability scenarios: a least squares (LS)-based scheme requiring only receiver-side CSI, and a singular-value-decomposition (SVD)-based scheme requiring both transmitter-side and receiver-side CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture enables accurate over-the-air inference for image classification. In particular, the results highlight the advantage of exploiting hardware nonlinearity for enhanced inference capability.