Papers

As an increasing number of critical applications, including environmental, emergency, meteorological, and agricultural, rely on real-time anomaly detection in geospatial data streams, challenges related to the storage, processing, and communication of this data arise. Traditionally, large volumes of data have been sent to centralized processing locations for insight extraction. Given the big data context of these applications, this approach becomes increasingly infeasible as data volume and velocity continue to increase. This paper proposes a lightweight edge-oriented approach for anomaly detection and localization for geospatial data streams. By leveraging the H3 discrete global grid system and a multi-scale drill-down logic, the proposed approach significantly reduces computational overhead, achieving a 99.7% reduction in evaluations compared to traditional flat-scan methods. Furthermore, by filtering out noise-induced flickering anomalies at lower resolutions, spatially-persistent anomalous signals can be efficiently identified. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively distills massive geospatial data into actionable insights.

Frequency Range 3 (FR3), spanning 7.125-24.25 GHz, is a promising candidate band for 6G communications, bridging the coverage of sub-6 GHz bands and the capacity of millimeter-wave frequencies. Its incumbent-dense and non-contiguous spectrum demands frequency-agile, interference-tolerant receivers (RXs) capable of hopping across fragmented sub-bands while withstanding strong blockers. Mixer-first RXs are well suited to this role, yet their design for FR3 has not been systematically addressed. This paper presents a hardware design perspective on mixer-first RXs for FR3, evaluating selectivity enhancement, harmonic rejection, linearization, low-noise design, and multi-phase clock generation under FR3-specific constraints. The analysis identifies viable techniques, fundamental limitations, and circuit- and architecture-level design tradeoffs. A central insight is that the frequency-translational property of mixer-first RXs allows selectivity, linearization, and noise cancellation to be implemented partly at baseband and translated to RF, enabling frequency-agile FR3 operation while shifting the dominant design constraints to mixer parasitics, baseband circuit robustness, and multi-phase clock generation.

As the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) is becoming common in everyday applications, their ability to interpret natural language has increased significantly. An emerging application of AI is integration with network management and orchestration practices. An instance of this integration is LLM-enhanced intent-based networking, where network operators will control a network using natural language. This work presents the use of dynamic routes with a semantic router to identify an intent from a network operator's prompt and extract necessary details for intent fulfillment in intent-based 5G+ core networks. Furthermore, the performance of static route selection is assessed by evaluating multiple encoders and dynamic route detail extraction accuracy against a series of realistic operator prompts. The presented results show that static and dynamic routes are successful in detail extraction and schema formatting.

This paper studies the construction of control barrier functions (CBFs) for force-controlled nonholonomic mobile robots subject to relative-degree-two safety constraints arising from position-level obstacle avoidance. A scaling-based reciprocal barrier construction is proposed, in which a positive motion-dependent scaling factor is placed in the numerator of a reciprocal barrier associated with the original physical safety function. The resulting barrier is defined exactly on the interior of the physical safe set and becomes singular on its boundary, thereby preserving the certified interior domain of the original safety constraint while recovering first-order control authority. For a force-controlled nonholonomic robot model, sufficient conditions are derived under which the proposed construction defines a reciprocal CBF, and the interior of the physical safe set is forward invariant under controllers satisfying the induced reciprocal-CBF condition. A scalar strict-feedback system is further used to provide a structural interpretation of the underlying higher-relative-degree cascade under explicit structural assumptions. Numerical simulations demonstrate the induced safe-set geometry and its integration with an optimization-based control framework for obstacle avoidance.

Transferring reinforcement learning policies from simulation to Real-World robots remains a major challenge, particularly when dealing with low-level torque control, where even small modelling inaccuracies can lead to unstable or unsafe behaviours. In this work, we propose a Real2Sim2Real pipeline that improves Sim2Real transfer for torque-controlled robotic arms by combining trajectory matching, parameter optimization via genetic algorithms, and domain randomization. Using the 7-DOF Franka Emika Panda robot, we first identify friction, inertia, and gravity compensation parameters by minimizing the error between real and simulated joint trajectories. These calibrated dynamics are then used to train a TQC-based reinforcement learning agent in simulation. The trained policy is evaluated in both Gazebo and MuJoCo environments, and finally deployed on the real robot. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement in tracking accuracy and policy robustness after parameter tuning, with smooth policy transfer from simulation to the Real-World across multiple target-reaching tasks. This work highlights the effectiveness of accurate physical modelling in enabling stable and generalizable torque-based reinforcement learning policies.

We propose an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) beamforming method that performs joint multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar sensing and multi-user MIMO communication. Our approach builds on a matrix nearness formulation of the MIMO radar problem and utilizes our recently proposed efficient solver, where the computational complexity is dominated by an eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) evaluation at each iteration. We extend this formulation to an ISAC scenario by incorporating minimum signal-to-noise ratio constraints as communication design criteria, only requiring statistical channel state information knowledge at base station. Furthermore, we propose a method to avoid the burdensome EVD evaluations in certain iterations, reducing the computation time by up to six times in a massive MIMO setting.

Generative segmentation provides an alternative to direct pixel-wise prediction by operating on learned latent representations, but effective image-to-mask translation must preserve target structure while remaining computationally efficient. We propose Generative Embedding Translation (GET), a structured embedding-translation framework that progressively transforms image embeddings into mask embeddings within the frozen latent space of a Stable Diffusion VAE. GET uses a U-Net-style Embedding Translation Network with 1.07M trainable parameters, combining Mobile Bottleneck Convolutions, Subsampled Self-Attention, and Multi-scale Feature Enrichment for local modeling, global context, and multi-scale refinement. Across five medical segmentation datasets, GET outperforms generative, CNN, and Transformer baselines. Compared with the strongest generative baseline, GMS, GET improves average Dice and IoU by 0.93% and 1.26%, reduces HD95 by 0.81 pixels, and uses 31.41% fewer trainable parameters. Under bidirectional BUS-BUSI domain shift, GET further improves Dice and IoU by 3.51% and 3.39%, while reducing HD95 by 27.37 pixels. Our code is available at: https://github.com/maklachur/GET.

This paper proposes a novel two-stage joint waveform design framework for multi-antenna Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems that simultaneously enable Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar sensing and Multi-User MIMO communication. First, a transmit waveform covariance matrix is designed by solving a convex matrix nearness problem for beampattern synthesis that simultaneously maximizes transmit power in desired directions and minimizes cross-directional correlations, while accommodating independent antenna power constraints and supporting interference suppression through radiation null steering. Second, a waveform conforming to the designed covariance is synthesized while additionally enforcing inter-user interference suppression via the zero-forcing approach and imposing practical implementation constraints, notably limiting the peak-to-average-power-ratio on the individual antenna elements. Simulation results demonstrate that the approach significantly enhances ISAC waveform design flexibility, performance, and computational efficiency compared to the alternative methods in the literature.

Ensuring reliability, safety, and economic efficiency in airline operations requires maintenance and fleet scheduling strategies that explicitly account for uncertainty in Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions. However, the integration of prognostic uncertainty into operational decision-making remains a major challenge. In practice, tail assignment (TA) and maintenance scheduling (MS) are typically optimized separately or sequentially, thereby limiting the effective use of predictive health information despite their strong interdependencies. This paper proposes a unified optimisation framework that jointly integrates TA, MS, and predictive maintenance (PdM) under RUL with confidence intervals. The problem is formulated as a stochastic mixed-integer linear program, and a scalable solution approach is developed by embedding a neural network surrogate to approximate expected disruption costs resulting from RUL uncertainty. The proposed framework is evaluated using operational scenarios derived from real-world airline data. Results show that explicitly incorporating prognostic uncertainty in a joint planning model reduces operational risk, i.e., downstream disruption costs and flight cancellations, compared to deterministic and sequential approaches, at the expense of moderate increases in planning cost. These findings highlight the value of tightly coupling predictive maintenance with operational planning and demonstrate the potential of surrogate-assisted stochastic optimisation for scalable, uncertainty-aware airline decision-making.

In adaptive control, parametric uncertainties in linear-in-parameter form consist of unknown parameters and known regressor signals. Convergence of the unknown parameters to their ideal values requires the regressor to satisfy a persistent excitation (PE) condition, which depends on future data and is therefore infeasible to guarantee online. Memory-based parameter update laws address this by enabling ideal parameter convergence under the online-verifiable finite excitation (FE) condition. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to construct a memory term via the Modified Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure for a class of multi-input multi-output nonlinear systems with an unknown diagonal control effectiveness matrix and bounded nonparametric uncertainties. Under the finite excitation condition, the constructed memory term yields an identity coefficient matrix in the parameter estimation error dynamics. The identity coefficient matrix eliminates the need for time-varying adaptation gains, enables an explicit ultimate bound on the parameter estimation error, and preserves the structure of the nonparametric uncertainty bound under the memory term. Building on this, a combined adaptation law is developed for controller gain estimation under FE. The closed-loop tracking and estimation errors are shown to decay exponentially to a neighborhood of the origin, characterized by an explicit ultimate bound, with a decay rate that depends solely on user-defined gains and system constants, independent of the level of regressor excitation. This removes the dependence of the convergence rate on the level of regressor excitation, a key limitation of existing approaches such as concurrent learning, memory regressor extension, and DREM.

Plastic pollution has become a persistent problem in natural ecosystems. Driven by insufficient waste management, limited recycling efficiency, and high costs for recycling, plastic waste in the environment poses significant ecological and health risks. Recycling requires accurate identification of polymer types, but existing optical sorting systems often struggle to distinguish common household plastics. In this work, we present a novel classification approach based on a multispectral imaging system consisting of nine cameras equipped with near-infrared bandpass filters. The system is designed to discriminate the seven most common household plastics. From the resulting multispectral images, we extract the spectral fingerprints and derive features such as intensity differences between specific wavelength pairs and their slopes, as well as false-color image representations. A dedicated preprocessing pipeline aligns and normalizes the data before classification. We recorded a multispectral household plastic database (https://github.com/FAU-LMS/MHPM) and trained four different classifiers Gradient Boosting, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Light Gradient Boosting Machine, and CatBoost. The best-performing model achieves a classification accuracy of 86.7%. The computational runtime is 2.603 {\mu}s per pixel, enabling efficient processing of high-resolution images. The entire setup is built from off-the-shelf hardware components, which makes replication straightforward and allows direct integration into industrial sorting pipelines.

This paper presents a real-time 60 GHz wireless video transmission system enabled by a millimeter-wave (mmWave) Dynamic Metasurface Antenna (DMA) and offers a 60 GHz transceiver solution. The end-to-end communication system is established using off-the-shelf mmWave up/down-conversion modules (EK1HMC6350, HMC6300, and HMC6301) with a connectorized DMA-based transmit front-end and universal software radio peripheral (USRP) for digital baseband processing. The proposed framework eliminates the need for costly high-frequency signal generators and spectrum analyzers, thus simplifying implementation and validation while reducing operational costs. A real-time HD video stream at 720p resolution (1280 x 720) is transmitted and successfully retrieved over a wireless link using QPSK modulation, achieving a data rate of about 3 Mbps with high reliability. The demonstrated platform can support various 60 GHz standard physical-layer protocols, such as IEEE 802.11ad/ay and 802.15.3c. This work highlights the potential of programmable metasurface antennas as a compact, energy-efficient alternative to legacy phased arrays for next-generation 6G and beyond mmWave/sub-THz wireless communication systems, small-cell outdoor backhaul links, and RF sniffing and channel sounding.

High-altitude platform station (HAPS) serves as a promising enabler for wide-area connectivity of low-power wireless devices, particularly in remote and underserved regions. However, the strong line-of-sight characteristics of HAPS links increase the risk of eavesdropping, while the limited energy budget of ground devices remains a major operational constraint. In this work, we propose a secure wireless information and energy harvesting framework for HAPS-based networks in the presence of spatially distributed eavesdroppers. The proposed system integrates friendly jamming and power transfer nodes equipped with null-steering capability antennas, such that they not only degrade the reception quality at eavesdroppers but also act as additional radio-frequency energy sources for legitimate users. A time-switching wireless information and power transfer architecture is adopted at the user side. Under this framework, we derive tractable expressions for the joint rate-energy coverage and the average secrecy rate using stochastic geometry tools. Numerical and Monte Carlo results validate the developed analysis and reveal key design trade-offs among the time allocation factor, null-steering-zone radius around each user, and jammer transmit power. In particular, the results show that properly coordinated null-steering jamming can simultaneously support secure communication and adequate wireless power transfer, while an appropriate choice of system parameters, such as time allocation factor and jamming power, is required to balance harvested energy, communication reliability, and secrecy performance.

Dual-band wireless architectures transmit the control information over the sub-10 GHz while reserving sub-THz for high data rate links, offering notable capacity gains. However, a critical bottleneck in such systems is timing synchronization. Due to the narrow beams of the sub-THz radio units (RUs), when the dual-band user equipment (UE) rotates or moves, it becomes necessary to switch the transmission between the sub-THz RUs. This switching requires recalibrating the timing of uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmissions to prevent communication disruptions. Moreover, for sub-THz RUs, the method introduces significant overhead and latency, especially when switches are frequent. Leveraging the reliable sub-10 GHz band offers greater resilience to UE mobility, making it suitable for control signalling. Thus, in this paper, we propose a deep learning-based algorithm that infers the propagation delay from the sub-THz RUs to the UE using sub-10 GHz channel characteristics. The inferred delay is used for calculating the timing advance for UL transmissions without the need for two-way synchronization. Simulation results show that the RU switch can be made seamless at the physical layer, without incurring any synchronization-related latency.

Speed of sound (SoS) is fundamental to ultrasound beamforming and a promising quantitative biomarker for tissue characterization. Although transmission- and reflector-based methods have demonstrated the diagnostic value of SoS, their need for dedicated hardware or constrained acquisition geometries limits clinical usability. Pulse-echo SoS imaging addresses these limitations by estimating SoS with conventional ultrasound probes and data acquisition paradigms. This review provides a structured overview of pulse-echo SoS estimation methods, categorized by the source of information used, the estimated SoS representation, and the reconstruction strategy. We review methods by their locality, e.g., global, layer-wise, and spatially-resolved predictions, as well as in terms of prediction strategies including gradient-free search, optimization-based solutions, analytical closed-form approximations, and deep learning-based methods. Finally, we summarize emerging diagnostic applications in the breast, liver, and muscle, while discussing challenges and possibilities with SoS imaging.

A terminal-area descent procedure need to perform across the wind climatology rather than a single wind condition. Although flight demonstrations of the delayed deceleration approach (DDA) showed substantial fuel savings, DDA combined late deceleration with a steeper $3.77^\circ$ final descent, obscuring the contribution of each design choice. In this work, we propose the continuous-descent delayed deceleration approach (CDDA), which applies delayed deceleration to a continuous descent approach (CDA) profile without a level segment before glideslope intercept. A simulation-based stochastic optimization selects flap deployment trigger speeds and glideslope-capture distance to minimize expected fuel under wind uncertainty subject to a given stabilized-approach probability. An optimal control reduction limits the design space to a few hundred candidates, enabling exact expectation over a weighted wind grid using six-degree-of-freedom fast-time simulations. CDA and CDDA are optimized at matched final angles of $3.00^\circ$, $3.50^\circ$, and $3.77^\circ$ for the A319, B737-800, B767-400, and A340-300. Results show that deceleration architecture is the weakest factor, yielding 0.3–3.9% savings at $3.50^\circ$ and becoming material only for the B767-400 at $3.77^\circ$. Glideslope angle dominates fuel saving. At the $3.50^\circ$ Category D design maximum, optimized CDDA reduces expected fuel by 11-21% relative to optimized $3^\circ$ CDA, while flap-schedule optimization adds 2-17%. The DDA level segment acts primarily as a tailwind-robustness buffer, and the $3.77^\circ$ final exceeds the 1,000 ft/min stabilized-approach sink-rate element, limiting its near-term operational applicability.

An effective open phase detection is one of the unsolved challenges for utilities. Open phase detection is expected to detect the broken power line before it falls to the ground, to prevent the ignition of wildfires. The existing open phase detection methods are normally based on abnormal currents or voltages due to three phase unbalances after open phase events. For a complicated distribution feeder with multiple branches, current-based methods usually have a limited protection range, and voltage-based methods possibly failed due to the recreated voltage on the open phase due to back-feed. This paper presents a new open phase detection method based on the connection impedance of two measuring points, which is calculated with the synchronized phasors. Under an internal open phase condition, the calculated positive-sequence impedance is much larger than the impedance under other conditions, and its sign is negative. This new method is applicable for a distribution feeder with a closed-loop configuration, or DER units connected at the load side. It is almost not impacted by back-feed. This new method only requires point-to-point communication. This method can be easily implemented in the existing recloser controllers or RTUs. It is scalable, cost effective, and reliable.

Two properties of optimization-based controllers such as model predictive control (MPC) limit their use in space flight. The online computing time varies and can exceed the sampling period, and the closed-loop behavior carries no formal guarantee. Explicit MPC, where a parametric solution of the optimization problem is computed, replaces the on-board optimization with a lookup table of piecewise-affine functions with a fixed execution time. However, it has been regarded as only applicable to small horizons, since the number of regions bounds the memory the table occupies and admits only an exponential bound in the horizon. This paper builds on recent developments in parametric solutions of quadratic programs and nonconvex reachability analysis to provide an entire pipeline for spacecraft rendezvous controllers under the Clohessy-Wiltshire dynamics. For this application, efficient data structures can be constructed to encode the control law, both from a computing time and a memory standpoint. In addition, the controller can be verified offline with a guaranteed closed-loop stability certificate by resorting to reachability analysis with hybrid zonotopes. At a 51-step horizon the rendezvous law occupies 10.5 MB and is evaluated in under 300 ns. The occupied memory would fit for instance the CubeSat flight computer ARM9-class AT91RM9200 meaning that the horizon limitation does not hold when the partition is built with the parametric solvers and data structures shown in this paper.

This work investigates the uncertainty-aware joint pricing and matching problem for dynamic high-capacity ride-sharing services, where passengers are assumed to be price-elastic and decide whether to accept a ride-sharing offer based on the upfront prices provided by the platform. We formulate the studied problem as a two-stage stochastic program, where the first stage optimizes upfront price decisions for passengers, and the second-stage recourse problem captures passenger-vehicle assignment based on passengers' uncertain choices. To enhance computational efficiency, we introduce a novel relaxation-based gradient descent-guided search algorithm that leverages the problem's structural properties. Initially, the algorithm generates a feasible solution for the first-stage problem via relaxation. It then iteratively improves the solution via a search process guided by the derived gradient information. In particular, scenario reduction is applied to eliminate unnecessary scenarios when calculating the gradient, thereby reducing the overall computational burden. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, compared to solving the stochastic program directly, the proposed algorithm can accelerate computation speed by thousands of times while achieving optimality gaps of no more than 1.1%. Finally, we validate the benefits of considering passengers' choice uncertainty through large-scale simulation using real-world datasets and road networks over two large cities. The results demonstrate that, on average, the proposed method can increase the revenue by 5.2% and the service rate by 8.2% compared to the baseline approaches. This study provides a valuable reference for transportation network companies to design pricing strategies for ride-sharing to enhance service efficiency and improve revenue.

Classical finite control set based model predictive control (FCS-MPC) reduces the optimal problems to an enumerated searching algorithm, which is very simple and effective to control power converters. However, it requires a large amount of enumeration operations, increasing its computational load and hardware costs. In this work, we propose a new and simple predictive control technique with extreme efficiency. The proposal directly selects the optimal vector via determined visual maps, abstained solely requiring a rearrangement of the cost function and a simple fitting law, without any enumeration. It has been validated under a lab-constructed power converter and a set of commercialized low-cost digital controllers. Experimental data confirm that the proposal achieves the same control performance as classical MPC, with significant computational burden reduction (up to 88% for one-step prediction of two-level converters)

Radio-Frequency (RF) holographic imaging reconstructs a volumetric map of the permittivity contrast from phase-coherent samples of the scattered electromagnetic (EM) field. The resulting inverse problem is severely ill-posed, as the receivers are orders of magnitude fewer than the unknown 3D volume elements (voxels). It is classically regularized by sparsity-promoting solvers such as the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA). Two assumptions limit these solvers: the L1 penalty is spatially uniform, and the EM forward model is typically approximated as a linear operator. This paper revisits the problem through algorithm unrolling, in which the solver iterations become the layers of a compact trainable network that preserves the EM forward model and learns only a few interpretable parameters from limited data. Building on the Learned ISTA (LISTA), a Weighted LISTA (W-LISTA) is first proposed, which learns a spatially-varying L1 regularization, steering the sparsity prior towards target shapes consistent with the deployment. Second, the Low-Rank Weighted LISTA (LoRaW-LISTA) applies a low-rank adaptation (LoRa) of the holographic operator to compensate for model mismatches from linearized EM approximations. Both methods are validated on full-wave EM simulations and on a 2.45GHz indoor measurement campaign with human-body phantoms. Combining the spatially-varying regularization with the low-rank adaptation of the EM model improves the signal-to-clutter ratio by about 70% over the ISTA and LISTA baselines, recovering structural details where classical iterative solvers fail. Inference takes less than 30s to reconstruct 1m^3 of scene on conventional GPUs. The proposed tools are rapidly adaptable building blocks for the sensing layer of emerging smart radio environments.

The low-rank alternating direction implicit (ADI) method is an efficient solver for large-scale Stein equations with low-rank solutions. This paper shows that, as in the continuous-time Lyapunov equation case, the low-rank Cholesky factor ADI (LRCF-ADI) method for Stein equations implicitly performs $\mathcal{H}_2$-pseudo-optimal model order reduction for discrete-time systems. This observation leads to an automatic shift-generation strategy, allowing LRCF-ADI to select subsequent shifts without user intervention. The standard LRCF-ADI method requires shifts outside the unit circle. We generalize the method to allow shifts anywhere in the complex plane, including on the unit circle. This extension enables numerical integration for frequency-limited Stein equations by interpolating the integrand at points on the unit circle. It also enables non-intrusive, data-driven balanced truncation and frequency-limited balanced truncation using experimentally measurable transfer function samples on the unit circle, without requiring access to a state-space realization. Numerical results for large-scale models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods as low-rank Stein equation solvers and data-driven model order reduction methods.

Harmonic programmed pulse width modulation (HPPWM), offering flexible harmonic regulation, is a promising solution for high-power energy conversion systems. However, most existing methods solve HPPWM in a continuous space while ignoring the finite timer resolution of practical digital controllers. This leads to a potential optimality deviation during deployment. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a Grid-Constrained State-Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (GCSA-PSO) strategy. By matching the solution space with practical timer constraints, GCSA-PSO directly searches for implementable pulse sequences in the discrete solution space, thereby improving deployment consistency while reducing the search burden. Moreover, a state-adaptive evaluation strategy is developed to assign different cost evaluations according to particle states, avoiding unnecessary evaluations and improving computational efficiency. Experimental data confirm that, compared with the classical method, the proposed method reduces the computational time while achieving higher control accuracy under practical digital-controller deployment.

Wearable and smartphone-based emotion recognition (WER) remains a challenging setting in affective computing, due to the notorious difficulty and bias associated with in-the-wild label collection. The high inter-and intra-subject emotional variability motivates us to explore WER modeling through graph node classification in a limited resources learning scheme powered by Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) graph masking augmentation tasks. We employ a subgraph sampling approach during training, utilizing labeled and unlabeled data, along with supervised, semi-supervised, and SSL mechanisms in a multi-task inductive graph neural network architecture. Our evaluations on K-EmoPhone through leave-one-group-out cross-validation in the binary arousal and valence tasks yield average accuracy gains of 4.3% and 7.8%, compared to the full resource setting, utilizing only 20% and 25% of the labels, respectively. Our model analysis sheds light on the relation of SSL graph augmentations to emotional arousal and valence and justifies the approach of SSL-driven subgraph training for in-the-wild WER.

Systolic arrays (SAs) have emerged as prominent hardware accelerators for matrix operations in deep learning, while floating point number formats enable precision control across computational domains. This research investigates approximate computing techniques for floating point (FP) multipliers in Weight Stationary Systolic Arrays, focusing on IEEE 754 (FP32), TensorFloat-32 (TF32), and Brain Floating point (BF16) formats. By integrating partial product matrix (PPM) column truncation with positive and negative compressors in the FP multiplier architecture, we optimize the trade-off between computational efficiency and accuracy. NSGA-II optimization algorithm was employed to explore the vast design space for evolving FP multiplier designs, towards achieving substantial hardware improvements while maintaining acceptable output quality. Substantial hardware benefits were observed in the FP multiplier designs across various applications, while preserving output quality. The FP approximated Processing Elements designed in the SA was found to offer comparable CNN accuracy for models trained on MNIST, F-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 dataset. The FP approximated SA designs that fall in the top 10 CNN performance offered substantial hardware gains in the range of 66% to 92% footprint savings, 60% to 93% of power benefits with 21% to 54% improvement in the delay when compared with the corresponding exact implementations mentioned in the literature for running the model trained on CIFAR-10 dataset. The TF32 and BF16 approximated SA designs also achieved substantial gains while maintaining comparable CNN accuracy. Our findings confirm that targeted approximation in FP multiplier design significantly improves the efficiency of hardware accelerators for error-tolerant applications, establishing an effective approach to hardware resource optimization in contemporary computing architectures.

Urban wildfire resilience depends on interactions among built form, vegetation condition, and extreme fire weather, yet city-scale risk models often overlook whether predictive skill transfers across neighborhoods. We developed a spatially validated GeoAI workflow for the January 2025 Palisades Fire, linking 12,081 CAL FIRE damage inspections to pre-fire Sentinel-2 vegetation indices, Landsat surface temperature, LANDFIRE fuels, terrain, and OpenStreetMap buildings and roads. Among 9,883 inspected residential structures, 5,566 were destroyed. Random cross-validation yielded ROC-AUC 0.92 for the integrated XGBoost model, but 1 km spatial block validation reduced performance to 0.75; logistic regression performed similarly and was better calibrated. Building count within 100 m was the strongest predictor, with destruction odds increasing 4.12-fold per standard deviation. Vegetation moisture and greenness showed opposing conditional associations: NDMI at 100-300 m was protective (OR 0.52), whereas NDVI at 30-100 m was positively associated with destruction after accounting for moisture (OR 1.74). Predictive information was concentrated at the 100-300 m neighborhood scale. A separate post-fire track mapped burn severity and vegetation recovery without leakage. The results support neighborhood-scale susceptibility screening, moisture-aware vegetation management, and spatial block validation as a minimum standard for single-event urban wildfire modeling.

Medical image segmentation requires high accuracy and robustness, yet practical commercial deployment also demands privacy preservation and computational efficiency. In this context, the U-Net architecture, which can be inherently decoupled into independent encoder and decoder components, serves as a natural commercial choice. However, pure Transformer-based variants like Swin-UNet often suffer from insufficient local detail capture and limited interpretability. In this paper, we propose a lightweight hybrid architecture built upon the Swin-UNet framework. Our model integrates a parallel CNN encoder to complement the shallow layer reasoning of Swin Transformers with local texture features. To bridge the semantic gap and enhance fine-grained spatial detail recovery, we design an asymmetric feature fusion strategy and introduce cross-layer skip (XSkip) connections that explicitly propagate shallow CNN features into the decoder. We further incorporate novel loss functions and an auxiliary supervision head (Aux-Head) to strengthen training stability, boundary delineation, and intermediate feature interpretability. Extensive experiments on the Synapse multi-organ segmentation dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art competitive Dice scores and Hausdorff distances, offering an accurate, efficient, and interpretable solution for clinical deployment.

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in array signal processing, for which the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) serves as a standard performance benchmark under both stochastic and deterministic source models. In multipath environments, the source matrix is of low-rank and, more specifically, exhibits a within-group proportionality structure. Although stochastic CRBs for coherent DOA estimation have been studied, theoretical results for their deterministic counterparts remain limited. This paper aims to bridge this gap. We first derive a tangent-space condition characterizing when structural constraints on the source matrix can strictly reduce the frequency CRB. We then prove that, for uniform linear arrays, imposing only the low-rankness of the source matrix leaves the frequency CRB unchanged, although it reduces the source-matrix CRB whenever the rank constraint is nontrivial, whereas fully exploiting the coherence structure yields a strictly smaller frequency CRB for almost all parameter values under mild conditions. These conclusions are further extended to analytic array manifolds and multidimensional DOA models, with componentwise results established for uniform planar arrays. The results demonstrate that performance gains in DOA estimation arise from the detailed coherence structure rather than low-rankness alone. Numerical experiments are finally provided to validate the theoretical findings.

Large audio-language models (LALMs) have shown promising progress in understanding speech, music, and general sound events, yet their ability to reason about how audio signals are degraded remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate semantic understanding, event recognition, or high-level audio reasoning, leaving a basic question unanswered: Do LALMs understand the differences in audio quality? We introduce MRMAD, a Multi-Round Multi-Audio Degradation benchmark for evaluating audio degradation perception and understanding in LALMs. MRMAD spans speech, music, and sound, and frames evaluation as multi-turn dialogues across multiple audio inputs, requiring models to identify types of degradation, compare severity, and perceive corruption changes across turns. Unlike current single-turn audio-language benchmarks, MRMAD evaluates whether LALMs can maintain consistent degradation hypotheses with new evidence and comprehend low-level acoustic phenomena over multi-turn dialogues. Through a systematic evaluation of 18 representative LALMs from non-thinking to reasoning and Omni models, we find that current models often recognize coarse content while failing to diagnose, compare, or reason about degradations reliably. Human evaluations further reveal a significant perception gap between LALMs and human listeners. MRMAD thus exposes a critical yet overlooked aspect of audio-language understanding and provides a diagnostic foundation for building future LALMs that are robust to real-world acoustic conditions.

Power-electronics systems should be treated according to their natural mathematical structure—inherent switching and discontinuities with piecewise continuous states. Therefore, the simulator should be organized around events, switching topologies, and topology intervals, rather than only around a continuous-time solver that later corrects or smooths discontinuities. This paper presents a simple, event-driven EMT architecture using native C kernels with Python orchestration. With this method, we distill the essential elements of discrete-event simulation applied to power electronics problems and thereby point toward a broad research thrust wherein mature ideas from discrete-event simulation are adapted for use in simulating power electronics circuits.