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Wednesday 22 July

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

End-to-End Learning of Safe Optimal Feedback Control in High Dimensions with Control Barrier Function Layers

We consider the problem of learning high-dimensional semi-global feedback controllers under hard safety constraints enforced by control barrier functions (CBFs). Incorporating CBFs into end-to-end policy training requires embedding a quadratic-program-based safety filter as an optimization layer, but computational and differentiation bottlenecks have largely restricted prior approaches to low-dimensional systems, typically with at most 16 state dimensions. We address this limitation by combining operator splitting with the recently developed Jacobian-Free Backpropagation (JFB) method to enable scalable end-to-end training while preserving hard safety guarantees through the CBF safety filter. We justify this training methodology theoretically using nonsmooth analysis techniques and demonstrate its effectiveness on high-dimensional multi-agent nonlinear control problems with state and control dimensions up to 1200 and 400, respectively.
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All authors Xingjian Li, Kelvin Kan, Deepanshu Verma, Krishna Kumar, Stanley Osher, Samy Wu Fung

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Safe and Scalable Multi-Drone Payload Transport via CBF-based Reinforcement Learning with Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer

Multi-drone payload transportation has emerged as a promising research paradigm with potential applications in construction, logistics, and disaster response. However, the complex coupled dynamics among drones, cables, and payloads pose significant challenges, and existing approaches remain limited in safety and scalability, particularly in dynamic and unstructured environments. In this work, we propose a learning-based framework for safe and scalable multi-drone cooperative payload transport. We introduce a minimal 2D abstraction that preserves the task-relevant drone-payload coupling required for coordination and safety, while remaining computationally efficient for large-scale learning. Using domain randomization over team size and physical parameters, we train a fully distributed policy via Discrete Graph Control Barrier Function Proximal Policy Optimization (DGPPO), enabling robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer without fine-tuning. Extensive real-world evaluations demonstrate that a single learned policy generalizes across varying team sizes and task scenarios. Furthermore, multi-group hardware experiments show that the same policy can safely operate in dynamic environments, where other drone teams act as moving obstacles. These results indicate that the proposed framework enables efficient, safe, and scalable multi-drone payload transportation with strong generalization to complex real-world conditions.
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All authors Jaeyoun Choi, Oswin So, Songyuan Zhang, Cooper Taylor, Chuchu Fan

Image and Video Processing

MedDiT4SR: Tri-Stream Joint Adaptation of Pre-Trained Diffusion Transformers for Medical Image Super-Resolution

Medical image super-resolution (MedSR) requires recovering fine anatomical structures from degraded observations while avoiding unsupported details introduced by generative priors. Large-scale pre-trained multimodal diffusion transformers provide strong visual priors, but their adaptation to MedSR remains non-trivial. In conventional ControlNet-style adaptation, the low-resolution (LR) image is processed as an external condition and injected into the denoising stream through one-way connections. Consequently, LR anatomical evidence cannot be jointly updated with the evolving denoising and semantic representations. We propose MedDiT4SR, a tri-stream adaptation framework that integrates the LR, noisy latent, and text representations into the same multimodal diffusion-transformer blocks. To complement global token interaction, we introduce a Super-Resolution Adapter (SR Adapter) that aggregates scale-dependent local tokens and suppresses interpolation-induced redundancy. We further propose a Semantic Alignment Refiner (SA Refiner) that calibrates local LR responses using prompt-conditioned semantic information. Experiments under both in-domain and within-modality cross-dataset settings demonstrate the effectiveness of adapting large-scale pre-trained DiT models to medical image super-resolution across diverse imaging domains.
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Image and Video Processing

HistoFID- Calibrating Frechet-distance evaluation across pathology foundation models

The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) compares two image sets by fitting a Gaussian to the features of a fixed network and measuring the distance between the two Gaussians. In digital pathology the Inception network is routinely replaced by a histology foundation model, on the assumption that a domain encoder gives a more meaningful score. We show that this choice changes the result. For one fixed pair of tile sets, the raw Frechet distance varies about thirty-fold across six common encoders, and the ordering does not follow embedding dimension, so a raw score cannot be read without naming the encoder. Using a held-out in-house cohort (about 500,000 H&E and immunohistochemistry tiles from 2,119 slides) and a public TCGA BRCA cohort (100 slides), we benchmark Inception-v3, Phikon-v2, CONCH, UNI2-h, Virchow2 and Prov-GigaPath across within-cohort baselines, cross-cohort drift, controlled perturbations, compression, stain normalization, and two generative models. Expressing each distance as a ratio to the encoder's own within-cohort floor restores comparability, cutting the across-encoder coefficient of variation by about 89% within cohort and 58% across cohorts. The encoders separate into a sensitive group (CONCH, Phikon-v2, Inception-v3) and an invariant group (UNI2-h, Virchow2, Prov-GigaPath), and this split decides which generative model is judged more realistic, so the encoder can change the conclusion of a generative evaluation. At the slide level, an attention-pooling encoder registers per-slide composition that a pooled patch distance cannot see, raising the distance about 320-fold on matched cohorts. Using the same protocol we evaluate TuroCompress, a proprietary pathology codec, which reaches the highest reconstruction fidelity at the smallest file size among codecs tested. We release the normalization protocol, the per-encoder perturbation panel, and the feature extracts.
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All authors Swapnil Bhat, Devansh Lalwani, Maulik Shah, Sheena Alphones, Rimlee Dutta, Nikita Mulchandani, Roshani Gala, Jay Mehta

Systems and Control

Human-Aware Power Restoration for Fair Outage Experience in Distribution Systems

This paper proposes a novel methodology for human-aware and fair service restoration in power distribution networks, explicitly accounting for the customer experience of outage duration. The complexity of this problem stems from the inherently unpredictable and stochastic nature of power outage events. Traditional approaches often oversimplify the problem by treating failures as deterministic, overlooking the lived experiences of customers and the true uncertainty of outage patterns. In contrast, the proposed method incorporates the probability of potential failures to guide a customer-aware and fairness-driven resource allocation, ensuring that restoration is not only fast but also perceived as fair from the customer's perspective. To achieve this, a spatially distributed, adaptive, and scalable partitioning policy is designed to balance restoration time across all failure locations, promoting consistency and equity in the outage experience. Next, an adaptive and distributed repair crew dispatch algorithm is proposed to accelerate service restoration while ensuring that no customer segment is disproportionately affected. The framework leverages a Receding Horizon (RH) optimization algorithm to dynamically minimize total restoration time amid randomly occurring outages in both space and time. Simulation results on modified 69-bus distribution networks under stochastic outage conditions demonstrate the model's effectiveness in delivering socially fair and customer-sensitive restoration outcomes
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Mapped ADMM: A Robust Algorithm for 1-Bit mMIMO Detection

Recently, it has been reported that one-bit massive MIMO (mMIMO) detection is equivalent to a binary classification problem that can be solved efficiently using support vector machine (SVM). Inspired by this result, we first reformulate SVM in a decentralized form consisting of multiple classifiers. This enables the use of the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (CADMM), a technique that can improve robustness and performance through its inherent consensus making. We further update CADMM to output only valid constellation points and achieve significantly improved detection performance. In our method, by changing the size of the grouped classifiers, we balance the number of classifiers for consensus accuracy with sufficient data per group to ensure classifier robustness. Ultimately, we demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing practically feasible methods for one-bit mMIMO detection.
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Audio and Speech Processing

Improved Monitoring of Honey bee Colony Strength via Audio IoT Sensors, Modulation Tensorgrams and Recurrent Neural Networks

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) play a crucial role in agriculture and ecosystem stability as key pollinators of crops and wild plants. As such, monitoring hive strength remotely with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors has become a crucial task. Previously, handcrafted features extracted from the modulation spectrum of audio IoT devices were shown to improve acoustic monitoring of colony strength. In this paper, we hypothesize that important discriminative information is present in the temporal dynamics of the modulation spectrum, but this information is discarded with prior methods. As such, we explore the use of a new modulation tensorgram where the time dimension is kept. This new representation is used as input to a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a convolutional recurrent deep neural networks (CRDNN). Using the public UrBAN dataset, which contains more than 3,000 hours of beehive audio recordings, we show that the proposed method improves both accuracy and cross-hive generalizability over prior benchmark methods, and the results further suggest improved robustness to noisy in-the-wild recording conditions. We use saliency maps and gradient-weighted class activation maps for explainability and show the importance of the modulation spectral temporal dynamics for the task at hand. Overall, our results suggest that accurate, generalizable, and robust acoustic monitoring of honey bee colony strength is possible.
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All authors Mahsa Abdollahi, Yi Zhu, Heitor R. Guimarães, Nico Coallier, Ségolène Maucourt, Pierre Giovenazzo, Tiago H. Falk

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC

State-Dependent Observation Noise Reintroduces Epistemic Value in Linear-Gaussian Active Inference

Recent work established that under active inference, linear-Gaussian state-space models lose their epistemic drive (any incentive to act so as to gain information) "under any circumstances". The epistemic term of the Expected Free Energy becomes constant: the agent flattens to a Kalman filter whose gain sequence is fixed in advance, regardless of action. The minimal departure that restores the drive is unknown; the only established route is control entering the dynamics multiplicatively; the observation side of this boundary is unexplored. We show that state-dependent observation noise is such a departure: a covariance R(x) that varies with the state x, representing a sensor's accuracy degrading with range. The agent runs the standard first-order Gaussian filter of this literature, R evaluated at the predicted mean. Coupling R(x) to a controllable latent mean makes the posterior covariance, and hence the effective Kalman gain, depend on the action. Consequently, no fixed linear-Gaussian filter reproduces the agent and, under a mild rank condition on the observation map and a non-degeneracy condition on R(x), epistemic value is no longer constant; for scalar observations, reachable non-constancy alone is needed. This is a minimal constructive instance of the Bar-Shalom-Tse dual effect in the agent's maintained covariance: actions now influence the quality of future estimates, not merely the state. Our library cpomdp detects the incompatibility from model specification alone and raises a typed IncompatibleLinearizationError. The theorem ships with an executable witness: exhibiting any fixed filter that reproduced the agent's beliefs would refute both theorem and witness at once. Together this offers a precise, observation-side characterisation of curiosity in a Gaussian agent, bridging dual control and active inference.
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Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD

Pushing the Frontier of Full-Song Generation: Hierarchical Autoregressive Planning Meets Flow-Matching Rendering

In this report, we present a unified song generation framework capable of producing high-quality full-length music from lyrics, text descriptions, and musical attributes. The proposed framework supports three tasks: Lyrics-to-Song Generation, which generates complete songs from text descriptions, lyrics, and musical attributes; Instrumental Music Generation, which creates music without vocals; and Cover Song Generation, which reinterprets existing songs with different styles while preserving their melodic content. Architecturally, our system consists of four main components: a semantic-aware tokenizer, hybird-LM, FullDiT, and a two-level melody module. The tokenizer encodes audio into 8-codebook RVQ tokens for efficient discrete music representation. Based on these tokens, hybird-LM performs hierarchical autoregressive audio-token modeling for full-song generation. To improve audio fidelity, FullDiT performs full-song flow matching in a continuous VAE latent space conditioned on codec tokens, lyrics, and text captions. For cover song generation, the melody module extracts and discretizes melody cues from reference audio to guide generation while preserving the original melodic content. Finally, we investigate DPO, GRPO, and OPD as reward-based post-training strategies for hybird-LM and apply flow-based GRPO to FullDiT to improve musicality and rendering quality. Experimental results on a multilingual automatic benchmark, complemented by the Artificial Analysis Music with Vocals leaderboard, show that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance in the evaluated settings.
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All authors Junyu Dai, Xinyue Fan, Weiqin Li, Xiangang Li, Yunjia Li, Bin Ma, Yukun Ma, Chongjia Ni, Yufei Shi, Biao Tian, Haoxu Wang, Menglin Wu, Jianwei Yu, Huaicheng Zhang, Han Zhao, Shengkui Zhao, Haina Zhu

Signal Processing

Joint Chirp Parameter Selection and Low-Complexity MMSE Receiver Design for AFDM Systems

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) has emerged as a promising waveform against doubly selective channels under high-mobility communication scenarios. Optimal chirp parameter selection and reduced-complexity receiver design in AFDM are essential for achieving satisfactory bit error rate (BER) performance with low computational complexity. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of chirp-parameter selection and low-complexity minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based receiver design by exploiting the structural characteristics of the AFDM effective channel matrix (ECM). First, a simplified BER performance metric is derived by leveraging the diagonal and circulant structure of the discrete affine Fourier transformation (DAFT), based on which a fast circulant-diagonal aggregation (FCDA) algorithm is developed for efficient $c_1$ selection. Then, a low-complexity banded MMSE (LC-BMMSE) receiver is developed by constructing a cyclic-banded ECM through path-wise structured sparsification, where banded Cholesky factorization is employed to avoid direct matrix inversion. Building upon the proposed BER metric and the LC-BMMSE receiver, a hierarchical-search-based joint chirp parameter and structured sparsification (HS-JCPS) algorithm is further proposed to jointly optimize the chirp parameter and sparsification pattern under a given complexity constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed FCDA reduces the search time for the optimal $c_1$ by an order of magnitude compared with using a BER-based criterion. Moreover, the proposed HS-JCPS algorithm with the LC-BMMSE receiver can identify a near-optimal $c_1$, while attaining a superior performance-complexity tradeoff.
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All authors Ruiyuan Mao, Qu Luo, Jianguo Li, Fabien Héliot, Tianqi Mao, Pei Xiao, Hee Wook Kim, Kai Yang

Signal Processing

JEPA-CFM: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture-based Channel Foundation Model for Robust Fluid Antenna Systems

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) have emerged as a promising technology for sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. By allowing antenna elements to move freely within a compact region, FAS can exploit rich spatial diversity without additional hardware. However, acquiring real-time channel state information (CSI), extrapolating channel values to unmeasured antenna ports, and determining accurate user positions remain major obstacles. These challenges stem mainly from strong spatial correlations within the limited aperture and the scarcity of observable data. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA)-based channel foundation model (CFM) specifically designed for FAS. The model adopts JEPA to learn versatile representations by extracting high-level latent embeddings of masked or unobserved channel segments. Unlike conventional approaches that attempt pixel-by-pixel reconstruction of raw CSI coefficients, JEPA-CFM focuses on predicting abstract structures in a compact feature space. The pre-training objective combines three complementary loss terms: the standard masked autoencoder reconstruction loss, the JEPA latent prediction loss, and a sliced isotropic Gaussian regularization (SIGReg) term. Together, these components prevent representation collapse and significantly enhance robustness under severe spatial correlation and highly sparse observations. After pre-training, the encoder is frozen, and lightweight task-specific heads are attached: a decoder for channel extrapolation and a global average pooling layer followed by a multi-layer perceptron regression head for wireless positioning. Extensive simulations in the realistic DeepMIMO urban scenario demonstrate that JEPA-CFM substantially outperforms the conventional masked autoencoder baseline in channel extrapolation and wireless positioning.
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All authors Yuan Gao, Yiming Liu, Jun Jiang, Jianbo Du, Shunqing Zhang, Xiaoli Chu, Kai-Kit Wong

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Fundamental Limits of MIMO ISAC: An Antenna Array Architecture Perspective

This paper investigates the fundamental limits of MIMO integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems, specifically comparing sparse arrays (SAs) against conventional uniform linear arrays (ULAs). A unified theoretical analysis of ergodic channel capacity and the Cramér$\unicode{x2013}$Rao bound (CRB) for angle estimation is developed while accounting for the array geometry. Utilizing the framework of stochastic majorization, the study reveals that SAs consistently outperform ULAs by creating a more $\unicode{x201C}$uniform$\unicode{x201D}$ spatial eigenvalue distribution, which decorrelates the multipath environment and increases communication capacity. For sensing, the paper proves that the angle CRB is inversely proportional to the array's second-order central moment of antenna positions asymptotically, demonstrating that SAs achieve superior accuracy$\unicode{x2014}$improving by up to the square of the number of antennas$\unicode{x2014}$due to their increased physical aperture. These analyses and conclusions are demonstrated to be also valid for MIMO ISAC systems employed with the modern waveforms OTFS and OFDM, suggesting that spatial geometry, rather than waveform, is the primary driver of fundamental performance gains in the spatial dimension.
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Signal Processing

ISAC-Assisted Channel Knowledge Map Generation for Physical Layer Authentication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables the acquisition of environmental information by leveraging wireless signals transmitted for communication purposes. In this paper, we utilize this capability to reconstruct the layout of objects surrounding multiple receivers. Ray tracing is then applied to the reconstructed environment to infer the propagation channels for various transmitter positions, thereby constructing a channel knowledge map (CKM). The CKM is then used to verify the position of a legitimate transmitter, authenticating it against an adversarial device attempting to impersonate it from a different location. This physical layer authentication (PLA) mechanism utilizes the approximate known position of the legitimate transmitter, obtained, for instance, from the network as in cross-layer authentication, to compare the channel estimated from the received signal with the corresponding CKM data. We evaluate the impact on the PLA performance of both ISAC-induced CKM reconstruction errors and receiver-side channel estimation noise, in terms of false alarm and missed detection probabilities. Finally, the proposed approach is validated using an ISAC dataset from the literature.
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All authors Luca Bonaventura, Edoardo Gardin, Alessia Barison, Francesco Ardizzon, Stefano Tomasin

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Local Stability and Gaussian Smoothing of Quantized Neural Networks

We study Gaussian averaging as a smooth surrogate for quantized neural models. Under bounded local oscillation, we derive a local dimension-dependent bound on |f-g|, linking Gaussian smoothing to the stability analysis of discontinuous networks. We compute closed-form Gaussian averages of the rectified linear unit (ReLU) and sign activation functions, and illustrate the mechanism on a high-dimensional binary perceptron, where layer-preactivation aggregation under an explicit quantization-noise surrogate yields the Gaussian envelope used in inference-side smoothing and training-side smooth surrogate gradients.
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Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Real-Time EEG Cap Electrode Detection for Guided Point-of-Care Placement

We present a two-stage vision system that detects EEG cap electrodes in a live webcam stream and validates their anatomical placement in real time. A single-class YOLO detector localises electrodes; a geometric stage assigns each detection to a named 10-20 role from facial landmarks. Evaluating under subject-disjoint leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation across five subjects wearing the clinically-validated Small/Medium/Large caps, the detector attains mAP@.5 = 0.94 +/- 0.07 across five held-out folds (0.96 pooled). A dedicated leave-one-cap-out axis, holding out every frame of a cap regardless of subject, leaves Medium and Large mAP@.5 within 0.01 of LOSO (0.97, 0.97) while Small drops to 0.72 +/- 0.28, a gap confounded with subject familiarity rather than cap style. Geometric augmentation (rotation, perspective, mixup) improves in-plane-roll robustness and temporal-electrode recall at no inference cost, and a landmark-driven head crop extends the usable distance range, lifting mAP@.5 from 0.23 to 0.45 at 0.6 x apparent scale. A compact mobile-candidate backbone (YOLOv10n) keeps the detector at real-time throughput (19 FPS) on a commodity CPU at 640 px.
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Signal Processing

Swarm and Evolutionary Computation for Near-Field Localization

Near-field localization has attracted significant attention in recent years due to the move toward higher frequencies and extremely large aperture arrays, which expand the near-field region and bring many sources into it. This implies that antenna arrays can be used to localize not only in angle but also in range. Although a wide range of localization methods has been developed, each comes with limitations that may hinder practical deployment. This article focuses on a class of techniques that has received relatively little attention in the prior literature despite its strong potential for accurate and efficient location estimation: swarm and evolutionary computation (SEC). These methods are well-suited to the complex optimization landscape of near-field localization and can offer important advantages over conventional approaches such as grid-based subspace methods and deep learning approaches.
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All authors Parisa Ramezani, Seyed Jalaleddin Mousavirad, Mattias O'Nils, Emil Björnson

Signal Processing

Ambiguity-Resolved Micro-Doppler Construction for Asynchronous Bistatic Sensing

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) can turn wireless networks into pervasive sensing platforms, but bistatic deployments are impaired by transceiver clock asynchrony, which induces random phase fluctuations in channel state information (CSI). CSI-ratio sanitization introduces nonlinear distortion that limits multi-target scalability and complicates delay- and angle-of-arrival (AoA)-domain processing. Cross-antenna conjugate multiplication (CACC) preserves a linear structure, but leaves mirror ambiguity and second-order by-products that corrupt motion-induced Doppler signatures. We develop a micro-Doppler construction framework that resolves the ambiguity and suppresses these residual by-products. Cyclic differencing first attenuates the dominant mirror component. We then exploit the facts that residual terms occur at differenced delay coordinates and lack an ordered AoA steering structure, designing a lightweight delay-AoA-Doppler pipeline that isolates the desired kinematic response without coherently accumulating residuals at target bins. The filtered responses are aggregated into a higher-SNR micro-Doppler representation. Ablation studies confirm the value of residual suppression and multidimensional filtering. On a large-scale WiFi gesture dataset, the proposed representation generalizes across four domain factors, attaining 90.1%-98.2% accuracy and outperforming representative baselines by about 18 percentage points on average.
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All authors Yiyi Xu, Zhongqin Wang, Kai Wu, J. Andrew Zhang

Signal Processing

WiFi Sensing via Reservoir Computing

Practical WiFi sensing must handle clock-asynchronous links, cross-domain variation, and post-deployment updating under the limited compute budget of access point (AP), router, and embedded Internet-of-Things platforms such as ESP-class devices. Reservoir computing (RC) is attractive in this setting because its temporal encoder can remain fixed while only a lightweight readout needs to be optimized and updated. To address these deployment challenges under tight compute budgets, we present ReWiS, a WiFi-sensing-oriented reservoir framework that transforms channel state information (CSI) into structured micro-Doppler streams with common, antenna-specific, and differential motion cues, encodes them with a graph-coupled reservoir, and adapts to a new domain after deployment by freezing the reservoir and fine-tuning only a compact readout with a few labeled target samples. On a large-scale WiFi sensing benchmark, ReWiS achieves 89.2% in-domain macro-F1 and 82.0% mean cross-domain macro-F1 with only a 0.72M trainable readout, improves to 88.5% after lightweight post-deployment adaptation, and remains competitive with recent deep baselines evaluated under the same protocol, which achieve 87.5%-89.2% mean cross-domain macro-F1, while requiring lower optimization cost and lower CPU latency. These results indicate that ReWiS provides a practical reservoir-based design for deployable WiFi sensing, with further potential for low-power hardware realization.
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Systems and Control

Time-Series Anomaly Detection for Mobile Robots in Automotive Active Safety Testing using an RNN-VAE

Mobile robots, like the ultra-flat overrunable (UFO) robot platform, used in automotive active safety tests, currently lack self-diagnostic capabilities necessary to detect present hardware defects. This circumstance can lead to more severe failures, causing expensive repairs and operational downtime. This work proposes, for the first time, a reconstructionbased time-series anomaly detection model for these mobile robots, considering defect classes such as unevenly worn full-rubber tires or damaged dampers. Unlike prior publications, the proposed approach leverages the vast quantities of unlabeled data generated during routine operation through a simple pre-training step. Furthermore, it optimizes the hyperparameters of the implemented gated recurrent unit-based variational autoencoder (GRU-VAE) and evaluates both a stateless, windowed training approach and one using truncated backpropagation through time (TBPTT). The model's generalization capabilities are demonstrated by successfully detecting six defect types, with four of them not present in the data used for hyperparameter optimization and threshold selection. This is validated using a test set collected from five system instances at various points over a period of several months, achieving an F1 score of 0.936, indicating strong practical viability.
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All authors Henrik Meyer, Karsten Raguse, Armando Walter Colombo, Thomas Seel, Simon F. G. Ehlers

Signal Processing

Temporal Broadening-Aware Multiplexing for Joint Sensing and Communication in THz Band

High-resolution wireless sensing has become an integral component of futuristic 6G networks alongside high-rate communication. Terahertz (THz) band enables both functions through its extremely large bandwidth, providing sub-centimeter level sensing precision and multi-gigabit data rates. However, THz propagation suffers from severe channel impairments such as molecular absorption (MoA) and the resulting temporal broadening effect (TBE). For sensing, TBE causes temporal spreading of received echoes, leading to degraded range resolution and necessitating long guard intervals between consecutive sensing pulses to avoid overlap. These guards, while necessary for far sensing receiver (Rxsens), cause latency and inefficient temporal use. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a TBE-aware multiplexing framework that exploits the distance-dependent nature of TBE to enable interference-free coexistence of sensing and communication (S&C) pulses. A guard interval preallocated for the worst-case TBE at far Rxsens is opportunistically reused to embed a low-power single-carrier communication pulse for a nearby user experiencing minimal broadening. Limited TBE confines S&C pulses within their designated slots at short distances, while the broadened and attenuated communication pulse at the distant Rxsens becomes negligible, eliminating the need for successive interference cancellation (SIC). Simulation results reveal that compared with power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA) and fixed-guard alternative, the proposed scheme achieves superior bit-error rate, sensing accuracy, and latency performance, with up to 66.5% latency reduction under heavy traffic.
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Signal Processing

Uplink Positioning for PASS in Multipath Environments

Pinching-antenna systems (PASS) enhance wireless propagation by activating or placing pinching antennas (PAs) near users. Therefore, accurate uplink positioning is essential for efficient communication. In this paper, an uplink multi-carrier positioning framework is established for PASS in multipath environments. Matrix pencil (MP)-based and low-complexity Rank-1 ranging algorithms are proposed to estimate the distances between the PAs and the user. For the MP-based ranging algorithm, the line-of-sight (LoS) component is separated from non-line-of-sight components by exploiting the shift-invariance property of the Hankel matrix, thereby enabling accurate distance estimation. For the Rank-1 ranging algorithm, the dominant LoS delay is directly isolated through truncated singular value decomposition, thereby avoiding matrix inversions. Subsequently, a two-stage weighted nonlinear least-squares (WNLS) positioning algorithm is designed to estimate the three-dimensional user position. To gain further insights, a comprehensive theoretical performance analysis of the proposed ranging and positioning algorithms is conducted. The closed-form ranging variances and position error bound (PEB) are derived to reveal the error propagation mechanism. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) The MP-based algorithm achieves higher accuracy and robustness than the Rank-1-based algorithm, while the Rank-1-based algorithm has lower computational complexity. ii) The positioning error of the MP-based algorithm follows the same trend as the derived PEB, whereas the Rank-1 algorithm exhibits an error floor due to multipath bias. iii) The positioning accuracy of the MP algorithm improves as the number of subcarriers increases.
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All authors Yaoyu Zhang, Xin Sun, Tianwei Hou, Anna Li, Yuanwei Liu

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

On Runlength Limited Codes for BICM Systems

We study the use of runlength-limited (RLL) block codes in bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) systems. In this setting, the RLL code acts as the symbol mapper, whose assignment between input bits and RLL symbols is critical for performance. In this work, we aim at optimizing the assignment scheme of RLL codes. One of the main applications of RLL codes is the mitigation of intersymbol interference (ISI) in systems with coarse quantization. However, channel memory and quantization nonlinearity complicate information theoretic analysis. To enable analytical treatment, we consider a block channel with 1-bit analog-to-digital conversion, modeling the transmission of a single RLL code block. For this channel, we investigate the relationship between the achievable rate in BICM systems-termed BICM capacity-and the RLL code's assignment scheme. Focusing on low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), we derive the optimization problem yielding the optimal assignment scheme. By looking at asymptotically large block-lengths, we infer a practical optimization strategy for RLL codes with finite block-length and channels with inter-block interference. Further, we extend this optimization to two-state RLL (TS-RLL) codes, which offer higher code rates than state independent RLL codes. We demonstrate that optimized TS-RLL codes exhibit significant performance improvements over literature counterparts.
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All authors Stephan Zeitz, Florian Roth, Meik Dörpinghaus, Gerhard Fettweis

Signal Processing

SNR-Dependent Mismatched Filtering for Bistatic OFDM Ranging

This paper investigates the ranging performance of a bistatic integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), in which an ISAC transmitter emits a communication waveform carrying random data symbols, and a separate receiver performs ranging by correlating the received signal with a locally demodulated symbol sequence. Owing to inevitable demodulation errors, the ranging processor operates under mismatched filtering rather than ideal matched filtering, resulting in a delay-domain correlation response whose sidelobe structure explicitly depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Focusing on frequency-flat fading channels, we derive closed-form expressions for the expected sidelobe level (ESL) and the average mainlobe level of the resulting mismatched ranging response for BPSK, QPSK, and general square QAM constellations. The analysis quantitatively characterizes how SNR-driven symbol decision errors reshape the delay-domain sidelobe behavior, thereby providing analytical insight into the SNR-dependent scaling behavior of ranging performance in bistatic OFDM-based ISAC systems. Simulation results validate the theoretical derivations and confirm the accuracy of the proposed analysis.
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All authors Ying Zhang, Fan Liu, Yifeng Xiong, Jie Yang, Xinyi Wang, Shi Jin

Signal Processing

Drift-Aware RL-based Wavelet Denoising for Network-Traffic Anomaly Detection

Traffic-utilisation measurements for network monitoring are corrupted by additive noise and statistical drift: time-dependent change in the signal's mean, variance, distributional shape, or tail behaviour. Static wavelet denoising, calibrated under stationary independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian assumptions, becomes mismatched under drift and, at moderate-to-high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), over-suppresses useful structure and degrades monitoring decisions. We propose a drift-aware framework treating adaptive wavelet denoising as a preprocessing layer optimised for two tasks: anomaly detection, recovering the multi-scale transient load bursts that noise and drift obscure, and capacity estimation, recovering the operational required capacity $C_{95}$ (95th percentile of utilisation). Because localised bursts are multi-scale structure a wavelet preserves but a low-pass filter removes, detection discriminates denoiser families. A four-detector gate (Page-Hinkley, variance-ratio, Jensen-Shannon, Anderson-Darling) determines when to invoke a learned policy, and a Proximal Policy Optimization agent selects a per-window wavelet configuration over a mixed discrete-continuous action space. Unlike prior work, the reward is downstream task utility, not reconstruction fidelity. The denoiser is benchmarked, per drift type and input SNR, against a low-pass moving-average filter, VisuShrink, SureShrink, BayesShrink, and a Wiener filter. Defining the anomaly target on the clean signal and the drift gate on the corruption keeps both stages non-circular.
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Signal Processing

Graph Distribution-valued Signals in Wasserstein Spaces: Theory and Applications

We introduce a framework for graph signal processing (GSP) in which signals are represented as graph distribution-valued signals (GDSs), i.e., probability measures in a Wasserstein space. This perspective addresses fundamental limitations of classical vector-based GSP, including the requirement for complete synchronous observations across vertices and the need for strict temporal correspondence in observed filter input–output pairs. Furthermore, by modeling the graph structure as a distribution conditioned on signal realizations, we provide a principled approach to signal-dependent graph structures, which are common in real-world applications, while explicitly encoding uncertainty in graph topology. Our framework inherently captures uncertainty and stochasticity while strictly generalizing traditional graph signals, which can be interpreted as Dirac delta measures. We develop a systematic correspondence between foundational GSP concepts and their GDS analogs, showing that classical formulations emerge as special cases of our framework. We establish theoretical continuity results for GDS transforms, providing stability guarantees for input perturbations and distribution approximations. We demonstrate the utility of this approach through example applications, including graph filter learning and anomaly detection, and validate its effectiveness through empirical studies.
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All authors Yanan Zhao, Feng Ji, Xingchao Jian, Wee Peng Tay

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

Towards Ultra-High Reliability in Wi-Fi 8: IEEE 802.11bn Core Mechanisms, mmWave Integration, and Performance Verification

As the demand for wireless connectivity expands from high-speed data transmission to high-reliability applications, such as the Industrial Internet of Things and immersive communications, traditional Wi-Fi technologies optimized primarily for peak throughput face new challenges in reliability and latency. Consequently, Wi-Fi 8 aims to achieve ultra-high reliability (UHR), improve communication performance in complex environments, and drive the transition from high-speed connectivity to highly reliable intelligent connectivity. This article provides a comprehensive review of the core mechanisms of Wi-Fi 8 and conducts system-level performance verification. We focus on the key enhancement mechanisms at the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers in IEEE 802.11bn, elaborating on their theoretical principles and key application scenarios. Additionally, this paper explores the potential role of integrated millimeter-wave (IMMW) technology as a complementary solution for spectrum expansion in the Wi-Fi 8 era, analyzing its basic architecture and implementation. Finally, system-level simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the key technologies in IEEE 802.11bn in achieving their performance targets, while further validating the robust performance of the IMMW scheme under practical hardware impairments.
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All authors Xiaoqian Liu, Ming Gan, Weijie Dai, Yuhan Dong, Calvin Chun-Kit Chan, Jian Song

Systems and Control

Integrating Deep Learning and Contraction Theory for Robust Nonlinear State Estimation via Unsupervised Scientific Machine Learning

A common way to design observers is to add a correction term to a copy of the system; however, designing the correction term for nonlinear systems remains a significant long-standing challenge. Contraction theory offers a unified approach to designing this correction term by solving a matrix partial differential inequality (MPDI) and identifying a contraction metric. However, solving the MPDI for both the correction term and the contraction metric is highly challenging, both analytically and numerically. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a learning-based approach to determine both the observer's correction term and the contraction metric by incorporating the contraction requirements into the learning process. The proposed approach relies on a scientific machine learning formulation that embeds the contraction conditions into the training loss function. The proposed approach is then extended to non-autonomous systems while keeping the correction term and contraction metric static to avoid generalization issues arising from time-dependent training. Computable bounds on the learning errors of the proposed observer are established as a function of the training residual and the sampling resolution. Furthermore, the robustness of the proposed observer to measurement noise and learning errors are established in an exponential input-to-state stability sense. Based on the robustness analysis, the present paper takes a further step by proposing a robust learning-based contraction nonlinear observer. The proposed observers are evaluated in numerical simulations for different contraction rates and measurement noise levels.
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All authors Yasmine Marani, Israel Filho, Eric Feron, Taous-Meriem Laleg-Kirati

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.OH

Digital Twin Modeling of a Highly Automated Agricultural Tractor

In efforts to increase research efficiency and availability, a digital twin of our research tractor (AMX G-trac) is created, focusing especially on the CAN communication for data reading and actuation command following the ISOBUS protocol. Mevea Simulation Software is utilized as the foundation, providing the kinematic model and visuals, while Python is used to read and write CAN messages over a Kvaser CanKing virtual CAN channel. Various performance tests involving straight line and turning behavior are performed in both the digital twin simulation and in the real world to measure similarity. Results indicate that the Mevea model behaves very comparable in its lateral dynamics, often within 5-10 percent, but requires better data to fully capture the longitudinal aspects like acceleration. The final model described in this paper sets the table for a second iteration to include more tractor functions such as hydraulics and tractor-implement dynamics.
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Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Nonlinear Bias-Compensated Adaptive Filter and Its Application for Time-Series Prediction

Most existing nonlinear adaptive filtering algorithms only account for output noise, neglecting the fact that input noise is also prevalent in practice. Although the recently proposed bias-compensated kernel least mean square (BCKLMS) algorithm addresses input noise in the nonlinear errors-in-variables (EIV) model, it still suffers from two major limitations. First, the use of a fixed-size dictionary restricts network growth but also prevents it from fully capturing the characteristics of the input signal. Second, as an least mean square (LMS) based algorithm, it exhibits poor robustness in the presence of non-Gaussian noise in the output signal. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes the random Fourier bias-compensated filter under general adaptive function (RFFBCGA) algorithm. Within the random Fourier feature based bias-compensated (RFFBC) framework, the proposed algorithm not only maintains a fixed network structure and effectively mitigates input noise interference through the BC term, but also achieves improved characterization of the input signal. Moreover, by leveraging the flexible form of the general adaptive (GA) function, the algorithm's robustness across various noise scenarios is further enhanced. Extensive simulations, including real-world time series prediction tasks, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
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Signal Processing

A Covert Precision Satellite Communication Framework Assisted by Cooperative IRSs

Satellite communication (SatCom), as an effective complement to terrestrial networks, has attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry owing to its wide coverage and high flexibility. However, the inherent openness of satellite links renders them highly vulnerable to eavesdropping, thereby posing significant security challenges. In this paper, we propose a satellite covert precision wireless communication (CPWC) system, where multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) cooperate to assist satellite transmissions, ensuring that confidential information is delivered to legitimate users while remaining undetectable to wardens. To further enhance covertness, an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based random subcarrier selection (RSCS) method is developed to concentrate the signal energy at the intended receiver. Under a practical satellite-terrestrial channel model, we derive closed-form covertness constraints for the CPWC system based on relative entropy and detection error probability. Under the relative-entropy constraint and the satellite power constraint, we maximize the covert rate by an alternating-optimization (AO) based semidefinite relaxation (SDR) iterative algorithm and obtain a high-quality feasible solution. Using this solution as a warm start, we further impose the detection-error-probability constraint and refine the beamformer through a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) based algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CPWC system, where the detection-error-probability-based scheme outperforms the second-order cone programming (SOCP) benchmark, the random-phase-shift design, the one-bit IRS quantized scheme, and the SDR baseline without precise communication (PC) in terms of covert rate.
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All authors Haoyang Wu, Yunfan Bai, Mei Shen, Yuwen Qian, Guangji Chen, Long Shi, Feng Shu, Jun Li