Papers

This paper studies integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) over a hybrid system that seamlessly combines legacy cellular base stations with distributed cell-free (CF) access points (APs). We propose a hierarchical ISAC architecture where a central base station (CBS) serves its near users and simultaneously operates as a monostatic radar for aerial target detection, while distributed APs—many idle under user-centric clustering—act as cost-free bistatic receivers. The CBS jointly handles communication processing and multi-static sensing fusion, reducing fronthaul overhead compared to conventional cell-free ISAC. To achieve this, a five-phase time-division duplexing workflow with precise ISAC role assignment is specified. Closed-form expressions for spectral efficiency and multi-static sensing signal-to-noise ratio analytically characterize the communications–sensing Pareto frontier. Numerical results confirm that the proposed hierarchical design simultaneously achieves higher sum throughput and superior sensing accuracy than conventional cell-free ISAC.

Scalable supervisors for multi-agent discrete-event systems control groups of isomorphic agents through a common template. Under partial observation, such a supervisor is maximally permissive if the relabeling that maps the agents onto their template is relabeling observation consistent (ROC) and a local companion condition holds. Whether ROC is decidable was open. We show that it is PSPACE-complete: for nondeterministic plants with two observable and one unobservable event, and for deterministic plants with two observable and two unobservable events. On the tractable side, we characterize the relabelings that guarantee ROC for every plant, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for deterministic plants whose relabeling is injective on unobservable events, and we give sufficient conditions based on saturation and on simulation, with polynomial-time tests for both. We further show that ROC is compositional for components with pairwise disjoint templates, with equivalence if the alphabets are moreover pairwise disjoint, and that neither hypothesis can be dropped. Finally, we show that the structural condition proposed in the literature to guarantee ROC is incorrect, and repair the companion inclusion that the same proposition asserts.

This paper presents a comparative study of real-time controller design methods for dynamical control systems subject to deadline overruns. Numerous techniques have been proposed to handle missed deadlines, i.e., including models or information of possible deadline misses directly in the control design. These approaches substantially differ in their assumptions, supported execution semantics, required runtime information, and provided guarantees, making direct comparison challenging. We address this gap with a qualitative assessment of representative deadline-miss-aware control methods. We analyze the design space of such controllers and identify the critical assumptions on the real-time constraints, the control design criteria and implementation aspects. We expose how these different assumptions lead to the different trade-offs in applicability, and control performance and guarantees. We contribute a comparison tool enabling researchers to systematically benchmark new techniques against the state of the art. The study is supported by simulations on two case studies: a Furuta pendulum and an electric motor to illustrate the practical behavior of the different approaches under missed-deadline conditions.

This paper presents a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) framework for joint electric vehicle (EV) and electric bus (eBus) charging-infrastructure planning with photovoltaic (PV) self-consumption. The model co-optimizes charger siting, sizing, technology selection, eBus-to-depot assignment, and hourly charging schedules. A deterministic MILP is first formulated as a nominal benchmark and then extended to a scenario-based robust min–max formulation under vehicle energy-demand uncertainty. The robust model uses shared first-stage infrastructure decisions and scenario-specific operating decisions, and minimizes infrastructure cost plus the worst-case scenario operating cost through an epigraph reformulation. Soft-feasibility penalties quantify unmet charging energy, terminal state-of-charge (SOC) shortfall, and capacity violations under stressed scenarios. A 50-node case study shows that route-segment eBus demand and PV weighting alter charger deployment, technology mix, and grid import, while V2G enables hard-feasible robust operation at sufficiently large penalty weights. These results highlight that effective long-term infrastructure planning must simultaneously account for diverse vehicle fleets, operational strategies that adapt to different scenarios, and node-level constraints on charging capacity.

Time-delays are known to have a detrimental effect on feedback systems. In the context of networked cyber-physical systems, delays can be injected by malicious adversaries. Detecting them early is an important challenge. This paper proposes a novel variation of Interacting Multiple Model filtering to detect delay injection attacks in feedback control systems, when hidden in an open loop setting. The detection scheme is formalised by treating delay as alternative modes of the system, and theoretical analysis of the stationary distribution informs a reduction to a three parameter model as well as the choices of hyper parameter values. The method is evaluated on a cruise control application, and shows detection within a few seconds and a low false alarm probability.

This paper addresses morning commute congestion caused by concentrated school-related trips in urban networks. We propose a bi-level optimization framework for regulating school start times in a multi-region urban network characterized by Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams (MFDs), explicitly coupling system-level regulation with multi-class user-equilibrium-based departure-time choices. The Upper-Level problem jointly minimizes total time spent and deviations from current school schedules, while the Lower-Level problem models commuter behavior through a deterministic dynamic multi-class user equilibrium formulation incorporating alpha-beta-gamma preferences for travel time, earliness, and lateness costs. To address the computational challenges arising from the bilevel structure, non-convex traffic dynamics, and endogenous demand responses, an iterative algorithm alternating between the Upper- and Lower-Level problems is developed. The Upper-Level problem is approximated through a formulation solvable with standard mathematical programming solvers, while an iterative algorithm provides an approximate solution to the Lower-Level equilibrium problem. Numerical results demonstrate substantial congestion reductions and characterize the trade-off between school start-time flexibility and traffic efficiency. Sensitivity analyses further examine the effects of MFD uncertainty and scheduling preferences.

In this work, we show that pilot contamination can be exploited to jointly increase the uplink sum rate and reduce pilot overhead. By leveraging the effect of pilot contamination on minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) channel estimates, we demonstrate that allowing users to share or use correlated pilots can, in certain regimes, yield better sum rate than with mutually orthogonal pilots or perfect channel state information (CSI) under maximum-ratio (MR) combining. To establish this result, we derive the use-and-then-forget (UATF) capacity bound for an arbitrary pilot design under correlated Rayleigh fading with MR combining. We show that, in the presence of pilot contamination, the key mechanism is the directional suppression of the channel estimate towards nearby interfering angular regions, enabling interference reduction. Numerical results confirm this behavior, demonstrating the sum-rate gain and showing that it grows with the number of antennas.

In some fields currently dominated by empirical approaches, such as state of health (SoH) prediction for lithium-ion batteries, phenomenological models motivated by quasi-physical thinking contain parameters to be estimated from experimental data. Often the structure of such models yields fully or partially confounded parameters, which are difficult or even impossible to estimate reliably. To preserve the desired model formulation and simultaneously improve the numerical conditioning for the problem we introduce a ridge regression scheme. An automated method is provided, based on information theoretic measures of model performance, which optimises the ridge regression hyper-parameter at each iteration. The formulae presented require fixed point iteration to solve for the hyper-parameter. Given a suitable starting value, analysis demonstrates convergence is very rapid. The optimal hyper-parameter selection mechanism is incorporated within an efficient regularised iterative generalised least squares mechanism, capable of fitting both heteroscedastic and serially correlated data as required. Simulation confirms the efficacy of the overall method.

Sea ice drift underpins air-sea-ice coupling and model evaluation, but the Southern Ocean remains chronically undersampled relative to the Arctic. This work presents a cross-polar comparison of GNSS-tracked ice-drift time series using rotary spectral analysis, principal component analysis, inter-buoy coherence, complementary shape- and amplitude-sensitive spectral differences. Arctic data are aggregated into Beaufort Gyre and Transpolar Drift seasonal composites (2017–2024); Antarctic data comprise eight heterogeneous campaigns (2000–2022) with small buoy counts and short durations. After common quality control, the clearest cross-polar similarity is spectral organisation: both regions show strong low-frequency variance and a hemisphere-appropriate rotary enhancement near the Coriolis frequency, interpreted cautiously as a combined inertial–semidiurnal response. Coherence is highest at synoptic scales and declines toward higher frequencies. Southern Ocean campaigns occupy a higher-energy envelope, so similar band structure does not imply similar drift amplitude. Principal components capture much array-scale motion, but high cumulative variance does not substitute for dense sampling of smaller-scale processes. The results provide transferable frequency-resolved benchmarks (dominant variance below 0.5 cpd and in the near-inertial band, an expanded Arctic reference, and explicit separation of spectral shape from amplitude) to inform future observing-system design without assuming identical dynamical regimes.

An adaptive nonlinear optimal-control scheme is developed by combining receding-horizon iLQR, state estimation, online parameter identification, and actuator constraints. AMIGO (Adaptive Model-based Intelligent Guidance and Orchestration) organizes the computation into three Time Phases: identification, planning, and closed-loop control. A supervisory adaptive loop monitors predictive consistency during closed-loop operation and can repeat identification and planning when persistent parameter mismatch is detected. The nonlinear transition is evaluated by the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method (RK4), and model parameters are refined by the Levenberg-Marquardt method (LM). The method is illustrated by a Van der Pol oscillator, a quadcopter, and an autonomous lunar-lander descent.

Egocentric vision systems capture human behavior from visible cues, but overlook physiological indicators of autonomic states such as stress, engagement, and attention. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a widely used noninvasive marker of autonomic regulation under stress. HRV reflects small timing differences between successive heartbeats and has so far been out of reach for egocentric platforms, where motion and noise in gaze video mask exactly this fine-grained timing. We propose EgoHRV, a method that estimates HRV as well as heart rate (HR) from the gaze cameras that are already integrated into egocentric headsets. Our pipeline combines a 3D backbone with a novel low–high decomposition module that extracts the blood volume pulse (BVP) signal from gaze video. Our cross-domain pretraining aligns the frequency-domain representations of contact-based and camera-derived signals. This alignment gives EgoHRV the temporal precision to recover HRV from the subtle fluctuations in gaze video. EgoHRV achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for HR and HRV estimation from egocentric video, and its uncertainty-aware design improves downstream behavioral modeling. Integrating our HRV estimates and confidence measures into EgoExo4D's proficiency estimator raises accuracy by 17.8%. Beyond skill, continuous HRV estimation also opens egocentric systems to stress- and arousal-aware estimation tasks. Code: https://github.com/eth-siplab/EgoHRV

Non-invasive continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring using photoplethysmography (PPG) is a promising alternative to cuff-based measurements. However, existing PPG-based BP estimation studies predominantly rely on aggregated performance metrics (e.g., mean absolute error) computed over entire evaluation intervals, which can obscure model failures during rapid BP fluctuations and limit clinical relevance. In this work, we propose a fluctuation-aware evaluation framework for PPG-based BP estimation based on time-series change point detection. Instead of heuristic BP thresholding (e.g., $\Delta\mathrm{BP} > 10\mathrm{mmHg}$), we identify BP change points by capturing abrupt distributional shifts in BP trajectories and evaluate estimation performance specifically during these fluctuation periods. Our analysis shows that several state-of-the-art models exhibit substantial performance degradation around BP change points, and that periodic test-time calibration is insufficient to handle such dynamic BP variations. To address this limitation, we introduce a targeted re-calibration framework triggered by detected BP change points, improving robustness without modifying model architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic evaluation of PPG-based BP estimation from a BP change point perspective, highlighting the importance of fluctuation-aware evaluation and calibration for real-world continuous BP monitoring.

High-precision Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) services rely on accurate orbit, clock, atmospheric, and hardware-bias corrections generated from reference observations. These products are traditionally derived from terrestrial reference networks, whose performance strongly depends on the density and geographic distribution of ground stations. Consequently, sparse or regionally concentrated networks can suffer from tracking gaps and limited global observability, reducing their ability to support globally consistent high-precision products. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations equipped with onboard GNSS receivers and inter-satellite links (ISLs) can serve as a network of spaceborne reference stations, offering a promising way to extend terrestrial reference networks into space, thereby improving observability for ground networks and enabling future direct correction broadcast. However, most existing network-based GNSS correction-generation workflows assume that observations can be centrally collected and processed. This assumption fails in practical ground–to–space architectures, where dynamic satellite geometry and system constraints render communication links intermittent, asymmetric, capacity-limited, and lossy. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a decentralized processing architecture that coordinates the ground-to-space GNSS reference network. By modeling ground stations and LEO satellites as interacting subnetworks over a dynamic graph, our approach allows frequent intra-tier communication while restricting cross-tier exchanges to compact estimation summaries transmitted opportunistically under probabilistic link availability....

Cable-suspended payload transport by multirotor UAVs is flexible but generates periodic swing disturbance that degrades tracking and risks instability. Existing anti-swing methods require additional sensors or precise identification of cable length and payload mass, limiting field deployment. We propose a swing-estimation and damping method using only the onboard IMU and throttle command, requiring no payload parameters. An extended Kalman filter extracts the periodic disturbance with the unknown pendulum frequency as an estimated state, and an active damping controller adds a correction angle to the attitude loop to dissipate pendulum energy. Flight experiments confirm robust damping across a tested range of cable-length and mass variations.

High-altitude platforms (HAPs) are emerging as persistent middle-layer infrastructures for space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs), offering a favorable compromise among coverage, latency, endurance, and deployment flexibility. Their role, however, is evolving beyond communication relaying toward the joint provision of sensing, storage, communication, computing, and intelligence (S^2C^2I). This survey presents a unified HAP-centric perspective on S^2C^2I integration. We first review HAP fundamentals, platform categories, and their principal roles in SAGINs, including wide-area access, relaying, backhaul, edge service, low-altitude aerial coordination, and cross-layer orchestration. We then develop an integrated architecture spanning multi-plane connectivity, payload functional splits, and a cloud-edge-HAP space continuum with hierarchical data, control, computing, and storage loops. The enabling technologies are systematically examined, covering heterogeneous RF, millimeter-wave, terahertz, free-space optical, and hybrid links; sensing payloads and integrated sensing and communication; onboard computing; storage and caching; and AI-based orchestration. We further synthesize standardization progress, open software and datasets, testbeds, field evidence, and a four-level evaluation methodology ranging from component validation to mission-level effectiveness. An emergency-response case study demonstrates that joint S^2C^2I orchestration substantially improves conjunctive service availability while reducing feeder-link traffic. Finally, we identify research opportunities in agentic AI, trustworthy autonomy, goal-oriented semantic operation and digital twins, and sustainable, certifiable, and open HAP-native systems. The resulting synthesis provides a coherent roadmap from platform design to network-wide deployment.

Distributed detection of an unknown deterministic signal is studied in a wireless sensor network with low-cost nodes. Sensors apply one-bit quantization to noisy observations and transmit over Rayleigh fading to a Fusion Center (FC). Score tests, including variants using observed Fisher information, are proposed as low-complexity alternatives to the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). The FC performs joint decoding and fusion, optimizing quantizers in a channel-aware manner to improve asymptotic detection performance. Simulations confirm the appeal of score-based tests under realistic wireless conditions.

Spatial aliasing occurs when two or more distinct locations produce highly similar place-cell representations, primarily due to environmental symmetry or repetitive structures. This issue is most pronounced when place representations are constructed solely from boundary vector cell (BVC) inputs, because symmetric or repetitive structures can yield indistinguishable sensory patterns across multiple locations in an environment. This work introduces grid cell signals to mitigate spatial aliasing in such settings. Because grid cells contribute periodic, internally generated spatial signals that vary independently of environmental geometry, they play a key role in disambiguating perceptually identical locations. We integrate multiple modules of analytically constructed grid cells with BVC-driven place cells and show that this leads to a 94–99% reduction in spatial aliasing relative to a BVC-only baseline across three environments: an open environment without obstacles; an environment with a cross-shaped central obstacle creating high visual symmetry; and a maze environment. The greatest improvement occurs in the environment with the highest visual symmetry. These results indicate that grid cells provide information complementary to boundary-based inputs, yielding more reliable place representations in geometrically ambiguous environments.

This paper is concerned with robust instability of uncertain network systems. We consider the multi-agent system described as a network of single-input-single-output agents with identical nominal dynamics subject to heterogeneous perturbations. The network description is formalized as a feedback interconnection of a diagonal uncertainty, nominal identical agents, and a static interconnection matrix. Assuming that the nominal network is unstable, we seek the robust instability radius (RIR), defined as the smallest norm of the stable uncertainty that renders the network stable. Conditions for the network stability are developed, and upper and lower bounds on the RIR are derived. When the network connectivity matrix is rank one and all diagonal entries share the same sign or are zero, we give conditions under which the RIR is exactly characterized by a small gain argument.

This paper investigates robust instability in nominally unstable uncertain networked dynamical systems, where all nominal agents share an identical single-input-single-output (SISO) linear time-invariant (LTI) system and each agent is subject to independent perturbations. This setting is motivated by the problem of sustaining periodic oscillations in nonlinear dynamics, for which exact analysis is generally intractable. We identify three classes of network structures including cyclic and certain rank-deficient networks for which the robust instability problem can be reduced to the analysis of a single representative SISO system. We derive sufficient conditions that exactly characterize the robust instability radius for these network classes. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed results by analyzing oscillatory behavior in a genetic regulatory network.

Advancements in emerging intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have shown immense benefit in reducing congestion, emissions, and accidents and enable lower-cost alternatives to highway lane expansion. However, there currently exists no standard metric by which agencies can assess the improvement potential from these interventions. As a result, they may fail to deploy infrastructure where it will be most promising or risk investing in infrastructure that does not meaningfully enhance performance. Our objective is to guide ITS deployment by developing a metric that quantifies the upper bound of congestion improvement from controlling speed limits on a highway. We propose controllable congestion, a metric that quantifies the maximum achievable reduction in system delay. To estimate controllable congestion, we develop a nonlinear optimization framework grounded in a reformulation of the METANET macroscopic traffic model and solved using model predictive control (MPC). Using both a synthetic scenario and highway data from the I-24 SMART Corridor in Tennessee, we find that controllable congestion is largely independent of total delay, revealing that for two days with identical travel times, controllable congestion can vary from 13% to 80%. We further show that the realizable share of this upper bound depends on the operational constraints imposed. On I-24, the minimum posted speed limit has little effect on controllable congestion, while frequency of speed limit update and maximum difference between adjacent gantries have large impacts. This framework allows highway operators to distinguish between congestion that is structurally unavoidable and congestion that is highly responsive to ITS, enabling more cost-effective deployment of control-based traffic infrastructure.

Construction electric vehicles (CEVs) are a promising clean alternative to diesel-powered construction equipment, but their adoption is constrained by sparse onsite charging infrastructure, limited CEV mobility, and insufficient understanding of their power consumption. We address these gaps through a field-data-driven framework coupling CEV power estimation with mobile-charging-aware work scheduling. First, using a real-world construction demonstration at the University of California, San Diego, we develop and validate a per-subactivity power estimation model for a compact electric excavator. Manually labeled video is synchronized with coarse battery state-of-charge (SOC) telematics, and constrained nonnegative least squares is used to recover each subactivity's average power consumption. The model predicts held-out test data within $17\%$ normalized mean absolute error (NMAE), and the accompanying dataset is released publicly. Second, leveraging the subactivity power estimates, we formulate a mixed-integer program that jointly optimizes CEV work and charging schedules together with the location, timing, and charging/discharging of mobile charging stations (MCSs) serving the CEVs. The optimization accounts for energy and demand charges, carbon emissions, unmet work penalties, MCS travel, and the physical and operational constraints of the CEVs and MCSs. Across realistic scenarios drawn from the demonstration, the proposed co-optimization attains the lowest operating cost in every case, being $7$–$96\%$ below the best-performing baseline, while solving most instances to proven optimality within an hour. Dataset and scripts are available at https://github.com/ghosh-avik/CEV-MCS-Power-Estimation-and-Joint-Scheduling.

This paper proposes a multi-level Bayesian calibration approach that fuses information from heterogeneous sources and accounts for uncertainties in modeling and measurements for time-dependent multi-component systems. The developed methodology has two elements: quantifying the uncertainty at component and system levels, by fusing all available information, and corrected model prediction. A multi-level Bayesian calibration approach is developed to estimate component-level and system-level parameters using measurement data that are obtained at different time instances for different system components. Such heterogeneous data are consumed in a sequential manner, and an iterative strategy is developed to calibrate the parameters at the two levels. This calibration strategy is implemented for two scenarios: offline and online. The offline calibration uses data that is collected over all the time-steps, whereas online calibration is performed in real-time as new measurements are obtained at each time-step. Analysis models and observation data for the thermo-mechanical behavior of gas turbine engine rotor blades are used to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Safe coordination in heterogeneous machine-to-machine (M2M) robotic systems is challenging when robots differ in sensing capabilities, environmental awareness, and motion execution roles. This paper presents a centralized safety-aware M2M framework for cooperative goal-directed navigation in a heterogeneous mobile robot team comprising a vision-capable quadruped and a camera-less robotic vehicle. The objective is to guide both platforms toward a goal region while avoiding static and dynamic obstacles and preventing unsafe inter-robot interactions. Under the principle of shared perception, the vision-capable robot provides semantic environmental awareness through a centralized server over an MQTT broker, enabling the camera-less platform to navigate using this shared scene representation alongside its own odometry, IMU, and state feedback. A vision-language model (VLM) interprets the visual stream, and the extracted semantic data is mapped into conservative metric geometric constraints, including inflated obstacle sets, safe corridors, and goal regions. A large language model (LLM) proposes high-level task allocations, while physical command authority is restricted to a robot-specific zonotope reachability gate. This verification engine propagates independent reachable tubes to evaluate obstacle avoidance, safe-corridor containment, and inter-robot separation predicates before approving commands. Online experiments across clear-path and dynamic-obstacle scenarios show that the pipeline reliably approves safe motion, triggers conservative replanning or holding maneuvers upon constraint violation, and enforces a strict architectural separation between advisory semantic reasoning and formally verified motor execution.

The idea of using Lipschitz extensions [1,2], or Gradually Varied Functions (GVFs)[3], for mesh-free scattered data reconstruction was proposed by the author in 2012 [4]. However, its practical application to modern mesh-free reconstruction methods has not been fully explored. Motivated by recent advances in computational tools, including AI-assisted mathematical programming and software development, we revisit this idea and investigate the use of a Lipschitz extension as an initialization step for Moving Least Squares (MLS) reconstruction [5,6]. Our computational experiments indicate that this initialization significantly improves the stability and reconstruction accuracy of MLS under sparse and irregular sampling. This is a preliminary study intended to establish feasibility; a fuller evaluation with additional benchmarks and comparisons is left to future work.

This article investigates the role of polyaniline as a conductive polymer in the active layer of perovskite solar cells. Samples were created by incorporating polyaniline into the transport layers to assess its impact on enhancing efficiency and conductivity. The application of this polymer across various layers of the cell structure led to improved stability and performance. Given its high doping capability, polyaniline was examined in detail, particularly focusing on two types of oxidation doping and its integration into the hole transport layer. Graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide were chosen as comparative models, and their performance was evaluated against the standard polyaniline configuration. Laboratory results revealed that power conversion efficiency increased by 17.5% with graphene oxide and by 36.8% with reduced graphene oxide. Furthermore, short-circuit current density improved by 9.8% and 23.1%, respectively. These findings are consistent with existing studies in the field and support the validity of the approach.

Highly directional 60-GHz Internet-of-Things (IoT) links can exploit naturally occurring indoor surfaces to sustain connectivity under blockage. Identifying viable non-line-of-sight (NLoS) paths, however, can require extensive RF beam training. This paper investigates whether LiDAR can reduce this search overhead by providing a surface-aware prior without assuming a direct mapping between optical return and mmWave reflection. The proposed framework uses LiDAR-derived geometry and return statistics to rank candidate propagation directions, while RF measurements remain responsible for final beam selection. The experimental validation is organized in three stages to separate descriptor robustness, cross-modal association, and beam-search performance. Controlled LiDAR measurements first quantify how geometric and radiometric surface descriptors vary with acquisition geometry. Matched LiDAR and 60-GHz measurements in an L-shaped corridor then determine whether these descriptors are associated with the measured surface-mediated RF response under a prescribed NLoS interaction. Finally, a separate room-scale campaign evaluates the resulting prior using exhaustive TX-RX beam maps without prescribing the underlying propagation mechanism. The measurements show that descriptor reliability depends on acquisition geometry and point-cloud representation, and that LiDAR and RF surface responses exhibit cross-modal association without supporting deterministic RF-power prediction. In the room experiment, local three-ring 3-D planarity retains a beam within 3 dB of exhaustive search at 74.5% of the measured locations while reducing RF beam-pair probing by 72% relative to exhaustive probing over the candidate search region. These results establish LiDAR-derived local surface structure as a communication-oriented prior for concentrating RF probing and reducing mmWave beam-search uncertainty.

Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) plays a crucial role in enabling robust, adaptive, and secure communication for military and civilian applications. Deep learning has enabled effective AMR methods that overcome the computational inefficiency of traditional approaches. However, these deep learning based methods often degrade significantly in low SNR conditions, where noise obscures modulation-discriminative waveform features. In this paper, we propose Bounded Residual Feature-wise Linear Modulation (BR-FiLM), a channel-quality conditioning block for AMR, which can be inserted into AMR classifiers with intermediate feature representations. We construct BR-FiLMNet by inserting the proposed BR-FiLM block into a Multi-Channel Convolutional Long Short-Term Deep Neural Network (MCLDNN) backbone. BR-FiLMNet conditions convolutional, recurrent, and dense features through gated residual corrections while preserving the original I/Q-driven feature path. Experimental results on RadioML 2016.10a show that BR-FiLMNet improves mean accuracy from 61.79% to 67.74% and low-SNR accuracy (SNR <= 0 dB) from 37.12% to 46.44% compared to MCLDNN. We further evaluate BR-FiLMNet against recent transformer-style baselines. The results indicate that BR-FiLMNet delivers significant and reliable performance gains, as validated through paired statistical testing.

Accurate localization and segmentation of the optic disc (OD) are important for retinal image analysis and glaucoma assessment, yet remain challenging due to variations in illumination, pathology, vascular interference, and poorly defined boundaries. This structured methodological review examines the evolution of OD segmentation from classical image-processing and deformable models to contemporary artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches. A structured literature search and study-selection process was used to identify representative studies spanning major methodological developments. The review first summarizes commonly used fundus-image datasets, then organizes classical methods by principal mechanisms, including intensity and thresholding, histogram and entropy analysis, morphology, geometric and Hough-transform methods, filtering and feature operators, texture- and region-based approaches, and active-contour and level-set models. This paper pays particular attention to the assumptions, strengths, limitations, and complementary roles of these methods in OD localization and boundary delineation. Representative AI approaches are subsequently examined to illustrate the transition from handcrafted features and explicitly defined priors to learned representations, Transformer-based segmentation, boundary- and shape-aware learning, promptable segmentation, and retinal foundation models. Across these methodological generations, several core segmentation principles persist, including region-of-interest localization, multiscale representation, geometric and anatomical constraints, and boundary regularization, although their implementation has shifted from predefined operators to learned modules, losses, prompts, and pretrained representations. The review further identifies boundary ambiguity, anatomical variability, domain shift, and cross-dataset generalization as continuing challenges.

This work proposes a hierarchical Model Predictive Supervisory Control (MPSC) framework for multi-agent systems with shared resources. MPSC integrates receding-horizon cost-optimal control with Supervisory control theory (SCT) based supervision that enforces safety, nonblockingness, and resource exclusivity. Scalability arises from hierarchical and scalable supervisor and automaton templates, enabling distributed execution without monolithic synthesis. Using this framework, this work develops an urban Unmanned aircraft system Traffic Management (UTM) model. The model supports pickup-and-delivery missions under time-varying demand efficiently.

Tool-using large language-model agents can complete a task while exercising authority that the user did not grant or the task does not need, causing excess-authority errors. Traditional permission gating systems alone for validating agent environments are insufficient. We study whether post-training can teach a 4B-parameter model to choose task-conditioned authority in executable terminal and Model Context Protocol (MCP) environments to complement those measures. We propose a framework where each action is audited before execution and again from observed effects along six dimensions of risk. This auditing is conducted using deterministic verifiers that score completion, evidence, exact state, prohibited attempts, and safe success. In conjunction with predefined task-specific sufficient-authority envelopes, we determine task-specific excess privilege values for trajectories, which are then optimized for in post-training. We find that after training using this framework on Qwen3.5-4B over 1,500 tasks, the selected seed reaches 98.48% safe success across 2,896 evaluation episodes spanning all 500 held-out tasks, compared with 64.36% for the base policy, and reduces excess-authority error events from 4.56% to 0.79%. Furthermore, external tests show capability retention and prompt-directed improvement. A 400 task continuation study also found evidence of generalization, reducing excess-authority events by 6.99 percentage points while maintaining previous capabilities. We conclude learned restraint through least-privilege aware post-training is therefore useful as an additional control layer for tool-using agents in executable terminal and MCP environments, but it does not replace permission gates and sandboxing.