Papers

We study a large language model (LLM) service in which a provider chooses a per-token price and a default reasoning-token allocation, while a user may accept the default, customize the allocation, or exit. Larger allocations can improve accuracy but increase token cost and latency. We model this interaction as a Stackelberg game and derive the user's unique optimal customized allocation in closed form. For any price, the acceptable defaults form either an empty set or a compact interval. We characterize the provider's optimal default through a three-regime rule, reduce equilibrium computation to a one-dimensional price optimization, and prove the existence of the equilibrium. We further show that defaults affect the implemented reasoning allocation only when users value the convenience of avoiding customization; otherwise, every service-providing outcome implements the user's optimal customized allocation. Experiments with two compact open-weight reasoning models on five mathematics and science benchmarks support the accuracy-token model and show how model and task characteristics determine equilibrium prices, defaults, and reasoning allocations.

Spherically invariant (SI) random processes can model impulsive noise and unreliable measurements. Recently, the mixture noise of Gaussian and SI components has been used in deterministic maximum likelihood direction finding. In this context, the Expectation-Conditional Maximization (ECM) algorithm, an extension of the expectation-maximization algorithm, has been applied and designed. However, simulation results show that the ECM algorithm always improperly converges. In this article, the ECM Either (ECME) algorithm, an extension of the ECM algorithm, is applied and designed, which additionally utilizes the actual log-likelihood function to first update partial parameter estimates at every iteration and does not need to initialize all parameter estimates. Moreover, the deterministic Cramer-Rao low bounds (CRLBs) of DOA estimators are derived and compared. Simulation results indicate that the ECME algorithm exhibits proper convergence and its root mean square errors of DOA estimates asymptotically approach the CRLBs as the signal powers increase, i.e., the derived CRLBs are correct.

We investigate sensing privacy in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems under the impact of phase noise (PN) arising from local oscillator (LO) imperfections. Specifically, we consider an ISAC scenario comprising a legitimate monostatic ISAC transceiver (Alice), an eavesdropper performing unauthorized bistatic sensing (Eve) and a communication user (UE), each equipped with a non-ideal LO. To characterize sensing performance in the presence of PN, we carry out a misspecified Cramér-Rao bound (MCRB) analysis of monostatic and bistatic range estimation at Alice and Eve, whose differential PN processes are self-correlated (delay-dependent) and cross-correlated (delay-independent) due to the use of a shared and an independent LO, respectively. Simulation results reveal three-way trade-offs among legitimate monostatic sensing at Alice, unauthorized bistatic sensing at Eve and communication to the UE under PN, governed by the LO quality at Alice. Through the LO asymmetry between Alice and Eve, worsening LO quality at Alice can significantly enlarge sensing privacy gap in her favor, especially for nearby targets, with only a moderate reduction in data rate in noise-limited regimes.

Semantic communication (SemCom) and task-oriented communication (TOC) can reduce wireless resource consumption by focusing on transmitting semantic or task-relevant information instead of raw messages. In practice, a main challenge is to make transmitting information robust to channel noise and fading while keeping it compact. Existing learning-based transceivers often improve reliability by using larger encoders or higher-dimensional channel features, which increase computation complexity and channel uses. Therefore, optimized system design needs explicit rate control to balance performance and transmitting resources e.g., bandwidth and power. For this purpose, we propose a manifold-constrained hyper-connection (mHC) coding scheme with an entropy bottleneck (EB) for resource-efficient SemCom and TOC over wireless channels. Instead of using a single residual path of existing encoders, the proposed mHC-based semantic encoder applies multiple residual streams and constrains their interaction by doubly stochastic (DS) mixing matrices. The new structure improves representation diversity and training stability with negligible parameter and floating-point overhead. The EB quantizes the channel features and estimates the entropy-coded rate, enabling end-to-end rate–distortion/task optimization under bandwidth and transmit-power constraints. We further show that DS-constrained stream mixing does not increase the differential entropy of the transmitted features. This implies no increase in the ideal EB coding length. Experiments on SemCom and TOC under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), Rayleigh fading, Rician fading, and imperfect channel state information (CSI) show that the proposed scheme improves semantic/task performance, communication robustness, and convergence stability over residual and unconstrained HC baselines, while requiring no additional channel uses.

To support the large-scale and heterogeneous visual cooperative perception (CP) demands in next-generation mobile networks, intelligent and efficient sensory data transmission is a critical challenge. Under the emerging convergence of communication networks and agentic artificial intelligence (AI), existing research emphasizes utilizing end-to-end neural networks to simplify communication modules, which has shown promising potential for CP. However, these studies are still limited to specific channel models, cooperation modes, and perception tasks, failing to fully leverage powerful visual processing approaches to enhance universality. To address this, we propose a Synesthesia of Machines (SoM)-driven Masked Token Model, referred to as SoM-MTM, as a plug-and-play paradigm for generic visual CP. Inspired by masked image modeling methods such as MAE, it possesses great perceptual context learning capabilities to recover distorted features over packet loss channels, thereby improving information carrying efficiency. Building upon Swin Transformer, SoM-MTM further embeds prior masked information through an External Routing MoE mechanism, maximally repairing and enhancing environmental perception features during cooperation. Comprehensive experimental results confirm that SoM-MTM can consistently enhance perception performances on various tasks, especially strong generalization to unseen scenarios, while maintaining favorable model cost and scalability.

This work investigates the spatially wideband (SWB) antenna array factor (AF) of uniform linear arrays. First, the SWB AF approximation is derived for narrowband (NB) signals and a large aperture with element spacing satisfying the Nyquist criterion. The derivation accounts for different spatial and spectral windows. Next, an approximation of the SWB AF for a wideband (WB) signal is developed under uniform spatial and spectral weighting. The analysis shows that for fully populated arrays, increasing the bandwidth effectively suppresses the AF sidelobes. Finally, a universal SWB AF approximation is introduced, which is based on recognizing the SWB AF as a spatially variant convolution. In this formulation, the SWB AF is expressed as a convolution of the spatially narrowband (SNB) AF and the SWB kernel, providing insight into how the bandwidth and the spectral weighting affect the resulting SWB AF. The proposed approximation is shown to be accurate for a wide range of bandwidths and element spacings, including sparse arrays. In particular, for sparse arrays, the bandwidth enables suppression of grating-lobe amplitudes by spreading their energy over a wider angular range. An approximation of the grating lobe envelope as a function of the bandwidth-aperture product is provided.

Long-horizon surgical robot manipulation is challenging because task rewards are sparse, while meaningful interaction changes occur at irregular intervals. Existing world-model agents typically imagine at primitive-step resolution, leaving variable-duration task progress implicit. Manually specified stages can provide intermediate structure, but their task specific boundaries are difficult to align with state-dependent interaction transitions. We propose S2-HWM, a Sparse Event-Structured Hierarchical World Model that learns sparse event evidence from primitive latent trajectories to coordinate an event-level manager and a primitive-step worker. The event evidence schedules manager goal updates, and each selected latent goal conditions the worker's primitive actions until the next update. The learned event evidence also forms variable-duration segments for an Event Transition Model (ETM), which predicts the next?boundary stochastic state, segment duration, and accumulated segment reward. Chaining these event-level predictions provides a variable-duration continuation beyond the primitive imagination horizon for manager learning, while the worker retains primitive-step actor-critic learning. On a SurRoL-based PegTransfer task, S2-HWM achieves a success rate of 98.7%, outperforming the flat GAS DreamerV3 baseline by 22.7 percentage points.

Research on automatic speaking assessment (ASA) has increasingly adopted multimodal speech large language models to assess learners' speaking performance. However, existing studies provide limited analysis of how acoustic and content information contribute to predictions and how stable the resulting performance is. We propose CASA, a simpler architecture combining Whisper-medium and Qwen3.5-2B that achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing a more interpretable separation between speech delivery and content. On the Speak & Improve Corpus 2025, CASA achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.358, improving on the previous best RMSE while using approximately half the estimated inference parameters. The general-purpose architecture is designed for adaptation to other ASA corpora without structural changes and relies on three handcrafted fluency features. Through ablations and repeated runs, we analyze the individual and complementary contributions of acoustic and content information, examine performance variability, and demonstrate the potential of large language model reasoning for training-free content validation.

The advancement of Intelligent Transportation Sys- tems (ITS) has been significantly driven by progress in radio communication technology. Dynamic route planning, a key com- ponent of ITS, traditionally focuses on metrics such as route capacity and travel time. This paper presents a novel dual- factor approach that integrates travel time estimation and radio resource availability into an innovative route-planning scheme for connected vehicles (CVs). To address this dual-objective route planning challenge, we employ Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Our approach, called AoI-Guaranteed Dynamic Route Planning (AGDRP), effectively balances travel time and Age of Information (AoI), enhancing route planning performance through adaptive learning over time. Simulation results demon- strate that AGDRP outperforms the baseline scheme, which solely focuses on travel time optimization. In fact, we show that incor- porating AoI minimization significantly enhances route planning performance beyond conventional travel-time-based approaches.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs certify that a message belongs to an allowed semantic class without revealing the message, but the certificate compares a high-dimensional embedding against class centroids, so its cost grows with the embedding dimension $d$. A Johnson–Lindenstrauss (JL) projection lowers $d$ to $m\ll d$ while preserving pairwise distances, yet a random JL matrix must be committed and its sampling proved inside the circuit, which is costly and a leakage risk. We construct a public deterministic projection from the standardized orbit of a Pisot $\beta$-transformation, analyzed through the spectral gap of the $\beta$-map, the geometric decay of its correlations, rather than equidistribution. We prove that the induced squared-norm estimator is unbiased up to a term decaying geometrically with a sampling gap, and that its variance is $V_0/m$ with a constant $V_0$ that is dimension-free in experiment and, under one stated concentration hypothesis, in theory. A single public seed preserving all pairwise centroid distances therefore exists and is found by search. Against six standard projections, including the chaotic-sequence matrix of Yu et al., the construction matches statistical quality to within measurement noise, and it is the only one simultaneously free of in-circuit randomness and exactly reproducible in a fixed finite field at a per-step cost $\log_2\beta$ rather than $2^{k}$.

The paper introduces the ante-hoc Explainable AI methodology to assess the global feature importance of the Machine Learning models used for heat demand forecasting in intelligent control of District Heating Systems, with motivation to facilitate their interpretability and trustworthiness, hence addressing the challenges related to adherence to communal standards, customer satisfaction and liability risks. Methodology includes use of four different approaches, namely intrinsic interpretability of Gradient Boosting method and selected post-hoc methods, namely Partial Dependence, Accumulated Local Effects and SHAP. None of the selected methods assume feature permutation or perturbations which can introduce bias due to introduction of random unrealistic values of data instances. Discussion of results is provided, including the assessment of complementarities where applicable, with specific interpretations in context of the district heating processes.

This paper shows that wideband large-array processing can recover a large number of angle pixels with far fewer antenna elements. The key advantage of wideband signaling is that different frequencies induce different virtual arrays, whose union forms a virtual array with a substantially increased number of effective virtual elements. Thus, a sparse physical array can support far more spatial samples than physical antennas. Motivated by this capability, we study the recovery of angular responses across the full field of view $[-90^\circ, 90^\circ)$, discretized according to the improved angular resolution, and refer to this sensing regime as angle imaging. However, the resulting virtual array is inherently irregular, clustered, and does not automatically guarantee stable recovery. To address this challenge, we introduce a coverage criterion that estimates the number of stably recoverable angle pixels, without computationally intensive singular-value-based conditioning tests over candidate image dimensions. For systems satisfying this criterion, we theoretically establish deterministic condition-number bounds that characterize stable angle imaging. Building on this criterion, we derive non-uniform sparse array designs that minimize the number of physical antennas while maintaining recovery over the full field of view. Simulation results show that the proposed criterion provides practical guidance for stable system design, and that the resulting sparse arrays can recover substantially more angle pixels than the number of physical antennas, with representative designs supporting over ten times as many angle pixels as physical antennas.

The growing power demands and variability of AI workloads make electrical power delivery a critical constraint in data-center operation. Distributed energy storage can reduce the power capacity required to support stochastic loads, but its benefits depend fundamentally on the statistics and time scales of demand. This paper develops a probabilistic framework that jointly characterizes provisioned power, energy-storage capacity, and the probability of overdraw. We show that storage-assisted provisioning separates into two operating regimes. In the Small Battery Region, overdraw is dominated by short-lived demand excursions and storage provides nearly linear reductions in the required power margin. In the Large Battery Region, overdraw results from sustained demand fluctuations over longer spans of time, and the required margin exhibits diminishing returns with storage. For this regime we introduce effective power, an analogue of effective bandwidth that captures the temporal statistics of the demand and gives an asymptotically tight characterization of the required power. We further quantify how temporal correlation and spatial aggregation affect storage requirements and statistical multiplexing gains, and extend the analysis to loads with multiple demand time scales. Finally, we evaluate the framework using power-demand traces from three production data centers spanning HPC, GPU-training, and cloud-service workloads. Despite their heterogeneous, cyclo-stationary and multi-modal behavior, the measured workloads exhibit the predicted regimes, and a simple four-parameter two-state model captures the dynamics governing their storage-power tradeoffs. The resulting framework provides both a probabilistic foundation and practical dimensioning principles for storage-assisted power provisioning in next-generation AI data centers.

Electrocardiography (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG), and phonocardiography (PCG) provide complementary views of the same cardiac cycle, yet existing cardiac foundation models are trained for a single sensing modality, leaving the shared physiology across sensors unexploited. We introduce CardioState-JEPA, a cardiac foundation model to learn a single shared representation jointly across ECG, PPG, and PCG, built on a physiology-aware joint-embedding predictive architecture. The model maps heterogeneous waveforms into a common token space, processes them with a single shared Transformer encoder, and learns by predicting masked latent cardiac states, placing the pretraining target on shared physiology rather than sensor-specific waveform appearance. To handle the temporal offsets between electrical, mechanical, and hemodynamic events, cross-modal prediction uses a learned delay aligner that matches signals at the corresponding cardiac time. Because synchronized multi-sensor recordings are scarce, CardioState-JEPA first learns within-modality structure from abundant unimodal data and then uses paired data to align modalities in latent cardiac time. Evaluated as a frozen encoder across 25 downstream tasks spanning ECG, PPG, and PCG, our encoder improves average PPG classification by 8.2 AUROC points, PCG murmur detection by 18.8 AUROC points, and ECG classification by 15.5 AUROC points over the best self-supervised signal baseline and matches or exceeds cardiac models trained with privileged clinical text or supervised labels on several ECG benchmarks. These results establish that heterogeneous cardiac signals can mutually supervise a single foundation model of cardiac physiology.

The proliferation of heterogeneous components in modern computing systems has been accompanied by new higher bandwidth and lower latency interconnects. These interfaces and protocols are enormously complex and the process of developing, debugging, and analyzing FPGA-based implementations requires significant engineering work. Moreover, once a functional implementation is completed, optimization of the controller and associated software requires processing potentially hundreds of gigabytes of trace data. In this paper, we present Dryas, an open source tool for analyzing such an interconnect. We developed our tool, using minimal hardware resources, alongside an FPGA implementation of a very high speed, low latency (30~GiB/s, 200~ns) interconnect. With our run-time reprogrammable overlay engine we can inspect this interconnect to find rare, complex, or transient events even at full operation. This filtering engine is based on non-deterministic finite automata (NFAs), efficiently implemented using state transition elements (STEs), allowing us to trace events at a cache-line granularity. Moreover we can change the filters in less than a second, without reprogramming the FPGA or interfering with the running application. This data enables not only debugging the implementation of the interconnect itself, but analyzing the behavior of accelerated applications. We examine the mathematical basis for using NFAs and describe their implementation on a real coherent CPU-FPGA research platform. We then evaluate the scalability of Dryas for various size NFAs, followed by two different use cases: debugging FPGA implementation of the interconnect and analyzing cache behavior.

While learned wireless receivers are typically studied using synthetic data, the impact of over-the-air (OTA) measurements for training remains unclear. We conducted a 5.88 GHz measurement campaign with a 5G/6G-like orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system across diverse environments and mobility conditions, and trained a neural channel estimator and a capacity-matched end-to-end neural receiver using mixtures of measured and synthetic data. Increasing the OTA fraction revealed a fundamental asymmetry: measured data consistently improved the end-to-end receiver, whereas the channel estimator peaked at an intermediate fraction and degraded with fully measured training. We identified supervision quality as a key contributor: OTA channel labels are derived from noisy received signals and therefore contain supervision errors correlated with the receiver input, whereas decoded bits validated by a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) provide effectively error-free supervision. Denoising the channel labels mitigated the degradation, and a controlled simulation showed that label noise of equal power degrades the estimator far more when it is correlated with the input. For OTA training, end-to-end receivers thus benefit from fully measured data, whereas channel estimators benefit from moderate OTA fractions but require improved label quality.

This IEEE PES Task Force report examines the security and resilience of large-scale Energy Internet (EI) systems, in which electricity, information, and market layers are tightly coupled through pervasive digitalization. The report characterizes the EI cyber-physical threat landscape and surveys detection, assurance, and mitigation techniques, presents modeling, control, and decision-making frameworks that capture cyber-physical interdependencies, including storage integration, multi-dimensional resilience, and electricity price forecasting, examines adversarial risks and trustworthy deployment of artificial intelligence, and introduces graph-based, attack-resilient information routing. The report closes with recommendations for research, standardization, and regulatory efforts needed to realize a resilient and secure large-scale EI.

Movable antenna (MA) is proposed as an emerging technology for future wireless networks. By leveraging the additional spatial degrees of freedom, MA can proactively reshape the wireless propagation environment, thereby enhancing network performance.However, fully unlocking the potential of MA networks necessitates the joint optimization of MA antenna positioning and beamforming. For this non-convex and highly coupled problem, existing solutions exhibit significant limitations. Therefore, this paper proposes a gradient-based meta learning (GML) optimization framework. Specifically, we first elaborate on the hardware architecture and channel characteristics of MA, based on which we analyze the primary challenges in optimizing MA wireless networks. Subsequently, we introduce the fundamental logic of the GML framework and compare it with existing methods. Furthermore, we discuss the constraint handling strategies for applying the proposed optimization framework to MA networks. A specific case is studied to show the performance of proposed framework based on numerical simulation. Finally, this paper outlines future research directions for both the GML framework and MA wireless networks.

High-fidelity ray-tracing (RT) channel reconstruction is a fundamental step toward building digital twins for the era of 6G wireless communications. However, precise calibration of complex electromagnetic material parameters remains a dual challenge characterized by massive computational overhead and strict accuracy requirements. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a Surrogate-assisted Grey Wolf Optimizer with Individual Memory (SGWO-IM) algorithm that simultaneously improves computational efficiency and calibration accuracy. In terms of computational efficiency, an online surrogate model is seamlessly embedded into the evaluation workflow for candidate pre-screening, substantially reducing the reliance on highly time-consuming real RT simulations. Regarding calibration accuracy, adaptive convergence and individual memory strategies are incorporated to optimize the global parameter search path, effectively enhancing the consistency between the reconstructed channel and measured data. Validated against measured channel data from a high-density urban scenario, the proposed algorithm requires only 225 real RT simulation calls compared to the 600 calls needed by the standard Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), cutting computational overhead by 62.5%. Concurrently, the final Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is substantially reduced from the 3.65 dB of GWO to 2.97 dB. The results demonstrate that the SGWO-IM algorithm achieves significant advancements in both efficiency and precision, providing a solution that effectively balances efficiency and accuracy for electromagnetic environment reconstruction.

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) significantly improves spectral efficiency but introduces security risks regarding the interception of embedded communication signals. This paper proposes an movable antenna (MA)-enabled secure ISAC system that utilizes the spatial degrees of freedom of MA to mitigate these risks. Then, a problem is formulated to maximize the system secrecy rate by jointly optimizing antenna positioning, transmit beamforming, and artificial noise. However, the principal challenge arises from the non-convexity of the optimization problem and the strong coupling of the optimization variables. Generally, traditional optimization methods for this problem suffer from complex mathematical derivations, while existing deep learning approaches rely heavily on the training data distribution. To address these issues, we introduce a gradient-based meta learning (GML) algorithm, which works without pre-training and demonstrates favorable performance. Specifically, the algorithm establishes a neural network for each optimization variable, where the gradient of the objective function with respect to the variable serves as the input, and the output of the network determines the variable's update step. By handling the constraints and constructing penalty terms, the global loss function is used to guide the optimization process. Extensive numerical simulations confirm that the proposed algorithm achieves satisfactory performance in terms of both communication security and sensing capabilities.

Satellite mega-constellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) are becoming an important part of next-generation non-terrestrial networks, but their operation remains challenging because of fast network topology variation, intermittent inter-satellite links, hardware disturbances, and strict Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints. Existing approaches based on Digital Twin (DT), Digital Twin Network (DTN), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) provide useful building blocks for intelligent satellite networking, but they do not fully support real-time, predictive, and platform-aware network operation. In this paper, we propose a Digital Twin Satellite Network (DTSN) framework as a closed-loop architecture for reliable and intelligent management of LEO satellite constellations. The proposed framework connects the physical satellite network with a synchronized virtual twin and combines real-time telemetry, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), predictive intelligence, and resilience-oriented control. To validate the concept, we develop a constellation-scale cross-domain co-simulation using the NASA 42 spacecraft simulator and a Python-based DT bridge for a LEO constellation. The DT continuously ingests physical telemetry to manage a multi-domain threat environment, encompassing kinematic drift, hardware failures, and adversarial jamming over a 600-second flight window. By leveraging a predictive lookahead mechanism and an exponential sensor recovery model, the framework successfully isolates compromised nodes and triggers proactive network reconfiguration, thereby ensuring uninterrupted service and dynamic network resilience. These results show the potential of DTSN to support predictive and resilience-oriented satellite network operations.

In this paper, we investigate a fluid antenna system (FAS)-assisted downlink mobile embodied AI network (MEAN) over interference channels, where multiple base station (BS)-agent pairs reuse the same spectrum. The BSs employ FASs to improve the communication quality, while the mobile embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents can adjust their positions according to environment-aware channel information, such as a channel-to-interference-plus-noise map (CINM). Considering both co-channel interference and the energy consumption caused by communication and agent movement, we formulate an energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem by jointly optimizing the agent positions, FAS port selections, and transmit powers. To solve this mixed-integer non-convex problem, we first derive the optimal transmit power in closed form for given agent positions and FAS ports. We then develop an iterative algorithm with adaptive FAS-port optimization and sequential agent-position optimization, together with a low-complexity power-update method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design outperforms the considered benchmark schemes and provides improved feasibility under severe noise conditions.

Distribution steering seeks feedback laws that drive the state law of a dynamical system between prescribed initial and terminal distributions. Optimal transport provides a natural geometric approach, but its implementation generally requires a transport map or coupling in the full state space. Sliced optimal transport avoids this full-dimensional construction through one-dimensional projections. Yet, the resulting projected maps specify only directional displacements and do not by themselves prescribe a realizable feedback law. To this end, we develop a finite-horizon control framework based on sliced optimal transport. At each sampling instant, a projected optimal transport map defines a directional terminal condition, whose minimum-energy realization yields a randomized single-direction controller. Averaging over projection directions gives a deterministic sliced feedback. For the single-integrator dynamics, the averaged feedback makes the sliced Wasserstein distance to the target non-increasing. For Gaussian endpoint laws, it is affine, preserves Gaussianity, and steers the mean and covariance to their prescribed terminal values. We further identify a law-dependent gain that yields linear decay of the sliced Wasserstein distance together with an explicit characterization of the control energy. We also prove that the randomized controller converges to the averaged sliced flow as the sampling period vanishes. Finally, we extend the construction to linear dynamical systems. Reachability-normalized coordinates allow instantaneous realization of the sliced velocity for uniformly fully actuated systems, while local controllability Gramians provide exact finite-step realization for general controllable systems. Numerical examples illustrate the resulting distributional flows.

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation has long turned on one question, which pseudo-labels to trust, and a generation of selection rules, dynamic thresholds, per-class curricula, soft confidence weights, answered it for the noisy, under-confident ResNet teachers of their day. Self-supervised foundation encoders change the regime: with a DINOv2 teacher, confidence saturates, so the filtering that helped a weak teacher can hurt a strong one. We propose CW-BASS v2, a saturation-aware pseudo-label selection method that reads the teacher's confidence regime rather than committing to one rule. It pairs held-out calibration, an unbiased per-class noise estimate, with a self-adaptive confidence floor that provably bounds retention away from 1, and combines them in a one-pass gate: measure the reliability of the teacher's confident set, pi_kept = Pr[correct | c >= tau], on a held-out slice, and filter strictly when it meets the confidence demanded (pi_kept >= tau), falling back to the adaptive floor otherwise. The boundary is the pre-existing operating threshold, not a value tuned to mIoU, and across six DINOv2 teachers it makes the correct strict-vs-floor call blind. CW-BASS v2 thus recovers the UniMatch V2 operating point on the saturated benchmarks by selecting strict (Pascal VOC 1/8 87.4 against its reported 87.9; Cityscapes within 0.5), and improves on it where the confident set is unreliable (pi_kept ~ 89%, ADE20K), where the floor edges ahead (+1.5 mIoU, single seed). The gate is principled because the failure it avoids is measured, not assumed: on a reliable, saturated teacher the confidence distribution's dynamic range collapses (98% of Pascal pixels >= 0.95), so an adaptive cutoff floods the retention mask and self-training decays into confirmation bias.

This paper proposes a decentralized approach for a multi-robot system (MRS) using a genetic fuzzy system to perform a collaborative object transportation task that minimizes the total path length of the MRS in unstructured environment while avoiding obstacles. For an environment given by an elevation map, terrain traversability analysis with respect to the slope is performed to reduce the dimension and identify non-traversable areas that can be considered as obstacles, and the given map is converted into a traversability map in two dimensional space. In the training process, proposed fuzzy inference systems (FISs) to generate the MRS's velocity for transporting an object to a target position are optimized by a genetic algorithm with several scenarios, such as a local minima, a target that is close to an obstacle, and a cluttered environment. The trained FIS models are applied to the testing environment, which is the converted traversability map, and validated using multiple scenarios.

Accurate time synchronization is essential for distributed systems. Conventional methods, such as satellite-based synchronization and communication-based approaches, face challenges including signal vulnerability and dependence on communication delay symmetry. This paper proposes a novel time synchronization principle based on traveling wave (TW) measurements in power grids. By leveraging the inherent symmetry of forward and backward TW propagation, the proposed method achieves high-precision time distribution without relying on external time references. The methodology is validated through electromagnetic transient simulations on a modified IEEE 14-bus system. The results demonstrate that under normal conditions, the proposed approach achieves microsecond-level synchronization accuracy. These findings suggest that the TW-based time synchronization principle is a potential alternative to traditional methods, offering improved security and reduced dependence on communication quality.

Growing integration of distributed energy resources increases power-system variability and uncertainty. During disturbances, these effects can intensify generation-load imbalances and cascading failures. Controlled islanding limits their propagation by partitioning a compromised grid into connected, electrically sustainable islands. However, classical methods face rapidly growing computational costs as network size and island count increase. Quantum optimization offers an alternative for exploring this combinatorial partition space. Yet monolithic quantum formulations encode all assignment decisions in one circuit, causing qubit demand and circuit complexity to scale with network size. In this study, a qubit-bounded sequential distributed quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) framework is proposed to tackle coherent controlled islanding under limited quantum resources. It formulates the optimization as boundary-conditioned regional quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) subproblems that are solved sequentially within a fixed qubit budget. Thus, circuit width remains independent of network size, with aggregate quantum workload scaling linearly on bounded-degree networks. Evaluation covers eleven IEEE systems from 9 to 300 buses using IBM quantum computing resources, with Gurobi and monolithic QAOA as references. Across all systems, the framework recovers feasible Gurobi-optimal partitions under noise, confirming the resilience of its solution quality. The results further show that the proposed method substantially reduces quantum-resource demand and circuit complexity relative to monolithic QAOA, allowing large islanding problems to be addressed within current hardware limits. The proposed framework provides a feasible and scalable pathway for quantum optimization in large-scale power systems.

Self-supervised electrocardiogram (ECG) models are often trained on a few seconds of ECG signal and, increasingly, on discretized token sequences. It remains unclear whether these choices sacrifice information needed for rhythm inference and longitudinal consistency in real-world ambulatory recordings. We present a controlled study on the Icentia11k single-lead dataset that varies (i) the input horizon (16 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes) and (ii) the front-end representation (continuous convolutional patch embeddings vs. fixed vector-quantized tokens), while holding the Transformer backbone and training protocol constant. Representations are assessed by downstream abnormal rhythm detection and by patient-level retrieval that probes cross-session stability. Our results show that increasing temporal context beyond 16-second snapshots yields stronger transfer and higher retrieval accuracy, with the strongest performance achieved by the 5- and 10-minute models, indicating improved capture of slow-varying rhythm dynamics and individual-specific structure. Across all evaluated horizons, continuous patch embeddings outperform discretized tokens, suggesting that quantization can discard clinically relevant waveform detail. These findings motivate ECG foundation models that emphasize extended context and continuous encoders for clinical prediction and similarity-based applications. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/muha-0/ecg-ssl-representation-learning.

Objective. We compared how strongly speech-muscle sources couple to electrodes on the jaw and around the ear, and tested sensitivity to source orientation, electrode count, and anatomical detail. Approach. Using reciprocity in MIDA (116 labelled compartments, 500 micrometres), we evaluated 22 electrode positions against ten segmented articulators. Muscle was modelled as both source and conducting tissue. Comparisons used equal electrode counts and a hemisphere orientation sweep, with anatomy-derived fibre models for temporalis and lateral pterygoid. Results. Orbicularis oris, buccinator, mentalis, depressor anguli oris, and platysma favoured the jaw at every sampled orientation and tested electrode subset. Temporalis showed a 2.57 dB ear advantage under the uniform sweep, reduced to 1.15 dB with the derived fibre field. Its jaw-minus-ear interval [-1.45, +5.46] dB crossed zero; 50.5% of four-site ear subsets favoured the ear. The derived lateral-pterygoid interval [-5.33, -1.12] dB favoured the ear at the fixed jaw basis. Both derived constructions have unresolved anatomical limitations. Simplifying non-muscle soft-tissue conductivities preserved montage assignments while changing gaps by up to 3.27 dB. Significance. In this head model, jaw placement better captures lip and chin activity. Ear-side preferences depend on source assumptions and electrode selection. Targeted four-site placement improved lateral-pterygoid coupling by 1.07 dB over the median random ear montage. These coupling predictions require experimental testing.

We analyze the original same-step coordinate-wise AdaGrad under generalized smoothness and heavy-tailed noise with bounded variance. In this setting, local curvature may grow sub-quadratically with the gradient norm, and stochastic gradients are assumed to have only bounded conditional second moments. We show that unclipped AdaGrad can become anisotropically miscalibrated: under heavy-tailed noise, the adaptive denominator can learn the geometry of rare noise shocks rather than the local curvature of the objective, leading to a persistent directional distortion that blocks finite-horizon Euclidean progress. We then prove that clipping repairs this failure mode. Our main result is a finite-horizon high-probability guarantee for the original non-lagged AdaGrad update, yielding $\frac1T\sum_{t=0}^{T-1}\|\nabla f(x_t)\|^2=\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{d\big(\sqrt{\log T} + \log \frac{1}{\delta}\big)}{\sqrt{T}}\right),$ and hence $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ complexity. This shows that, for AdaGrad under heavy-tailed noise, clipping is a structural stabilizer of the adaptive geometry rather than merely a robustness heuristic.