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Monday 24 August

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Semantic Reconstruction and 3-D Detection via Learned Multi-Pair Fusion in RF Imaging

We consider a multistatic radio-frequency imaging problem with anisotropy, in which the reflection from a point depends on the positions of the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) arrays. The goal is to label the voxels of a field of view by a finite set of semantic classes and to group them into object instances. For the image formation of each Tx–Rx pair we apply a standard inverse-problem solver, and we feed the resulting per-pair reconstructions into a trained three-dimensional (3-D) U-Net that performs the fusion implicitly and the per-voxel classification explicitly. On a controlled, under-determined multistatic setup, we consider the following image formation methods: back-projection (BP) and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) from a single deterministic snapshot, and incoherent BP and group-LASSO from multiple fading snapshots. For each imaging method we train a separate U-Net that fuses the six Tx–Rx pairs (its input channels) and assigns each voxel a probability vector over the classes. Taking the most probable class gives a labeled volume—the semantic reconstruction. Object instances and their oriented bounding boxes then follow by geometric post-processing (clustering and principal-component analysis). Across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio, the semantic reconstruction (scored against ground truth by segmentation intersection-over-union) and the resulting 3-D detection degrade far more gracefully than the classical intensity reconstruction: the detection in particular stays reliable well into noise levels at which that reconstruction has dissolved. Because real scenes contain objects of classes the network was not trained on, we add an explicit unknown class trained by outlier exposure, which labels held-out novel objects as unknown instead of mislabeling them as a known class by reconstructed shape.
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Systems and Control

Dynamic Inversion: An Incrementally Evolving Methodology for Flight Control Design

Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) has become a standard methodology in flight control law design. It offers an intuitive approach to decouple commanded variable responses, handle system nonlinearities, and adapt to operating conditions. NDI also comes with a well-structured architecture that reduces design effort by addressing various functional aspects in separate components, and that allows straightforward integration of extended capabilities, such as envelope protection, control saturation handling, and compensating for faults or damage. A development that has resulted in considerable renewed attention is the use of (angular) acceleration sensors to partially replace inverse model equations. Known as incremental NDI, or INDI, this development offers reduced sensitivity to modeling errors and lower control law complexity. Incremental NDI, however, lacks useful design degrees of freedom in the previously present inverse model equations and underlying feedback signal synthesis, and comes with pitfalls in design aspects like control allocation, disturbance rejection, and inter-disciplinary couplings. This has given rise to recently developed hybrid and mathematically restructured approaches. The aim of this article is to give an up-to-date, structured overview of the various evolved forms of NDI from conceptual, historical, architectural, and mathematical perspectives. It hereby intends to provide useful considerations for future flight control law developments by reviewing its various forms and potentials from methodological, design, and application points of view.
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Image and Video Processing

An Energy-Proportional Multimodal and Context-Aware Vision IoT Node

While recent advancements in TinyML have significantly reduced the computational complexity of on-device vision pipelines, image acquisition remains a dominant contributor to system-level energy consumption and memory footprint. In vision-enabled IoT platforms, the image sensor consumes energy comparable to the inference engine, thereby offsetting algorithmic efficiency gains. Consequently, current designs face a fundamental trade-off: continuous and always-on sensing incurs prohibitive energy consumption, whereas aggressive duty cycling increases latency and risks missing transient events. This work presents an energy-proportional, context-aware vision IoT node that addresses this challenge through a heterogeneous multimodal dual-camera architecture. Detection and recognition are decoupled by combining an event-based imager operating asynchronously in an energy-efficient always-on wake-on-motion mode together with an RGB imager. Deployed on a low-power microcontroller, a novel TinyissimoYOLOv12 is introduced for efficient and accurate object detection. By activating the high-power image acquisition and processing stages only upon sparse visual triggers, the proposed architecture improves efficiency and latency, eliminating redundant sensing while maintaining continuous monitoring coverage. Experimental results demonstrate an energy consumption of only 222$\mu$Wh. Upon a motion trigger, the system completes a full sense-to-report cycle-RGB acquisition, object detection across 80 classes, and LoRa telemetry-with a total energy consumption of 28.7mJ. The network achieves up to 32.3% mAP with a model size of 1 million parameters. At a 1% daily activity ratio, the platform achieves a three-month operational lifetime with a 1.85Wh battery, enabling always-on visual monitoring in a place-and-forget scenario through autonomous edge intelligence.
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All authors Julian Moosmann, Philipp Mayer, Luca Benini, Michele Magno

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Zeroth-Order Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization with Convex Liftings and Its Application to State-Feedback $H_\infty$ Policy Optimization

Direct policy optimization is widely used in reinforcement learning and control, but generally leads to nonconvex optimization problems. For state-feedback $H_\infty$ control, the policy objective is also nonsmooth, despite possessing a benign landscape whose hidden convexity can be revealed by the recently developed extended convex lifting framework. Motivated by recent advances in hidden convex optimization, we study zeroth-order optimization of nonsmooth, nonconvex problems admitting a convex lifting. We propose a zeroth-order proximal point algorithm: An inexact proximal-point outer loop constructs strongly convex subproblems, while an inner loop approximately solves each subproblem using only function evaluations. With probability at least $1-\delta$, our proposed algorithm returns an $\epsilon$-optimal solution using $\widetilde{O}\left(d\epsilon^{-3}\right)$ function evaluations, while all iterates remain feasible without explicit projection. Finally, we verify that the assumptions underlying our analysis hold for discrete-time state-feedback $H_\infty$ policy optimization, yielding an oracle complexity of $\widetilde{O}\left(n_u n_x\epsilon^{-3}\right)$ for attaining a prescribed objective value gap, where $n_u\times n_x$ is the dimension of the feedback gain to be optimized over.
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Systems and Control

Leveraging UAV Autonomy for Minimum 4D Flight Authorization Volumes

The increasing UAV traffic in urban areas has prompted the creation of U-space, an EASA framework for safe and efficient unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations. Within this context, this work presents a flight authorization framework that leverages autonomous UAVs, using their motion models and control characteristics to improve authorization efficiency. In the proposed framework, probabilistic spatial-temporal envelopes are generated to predict future UAV locations within a desired confidence level, and this information is then used to determine the minimum 4D operational volumes that form a valid authorization request for the mission. By reserving only the necessary airspace, the approach enhances capacity and supports simultaneous UAV operations. Simulations comparing the proposed method with a conventional rule-based strategy demonstrate consistently more compact and efficient airspace reservations across a range of mission types.
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All authors Christian Vitale, Yiannis Grigoriou, Panayiotis Kolios, Georgios Ellinas

Signal Processing

Monotonicity Principle and "p-Laplace Signature" for Tomography in Nonlinear Elliptic Inverse Problems

This paper proposes a framework for treating the inverse obstacle problem for nonlinear elliptic equations with nonlinear materials. The problem is challenging because nonlinear materials exhibit a rich diversity of scenarios to consider, since nonlinearity can take different forms. In this article, after categorizing the nonlinearities into a few fundamental classes, a dedicated imaging method is proposed for each class, derived by combining two powerful concepts: the Monotonicity Principle (MP) and the $p-$Laplace Signature (pLS). The Monotonicity Principle (MP), recently extended to nonlinear materials, provides a monotonic relationship between the material property and the measured quantity (the Average Dirichlet-to-Neumann map) that can be \lq\lq inverted\rq\rq \ to find the shape of anomalies. The $p-$Laplace Signature (pLS) allows for modelling the solution of an elliptic PDE with nonlinear materials, for large or small boundary data, in terms of a proper $p-$Laplace equation that captures the essence (the signature) of the problem. For example, pLS with $p=2$ allows the reduction of a nonlinear elliptic PDE to a linear one, providing a powerful bridge for applying imaging methods and algorithms developed for linear materials. In this contribution, the two pillars of MP and pLS are combined in new imaging methods to enlarge the class of nonlinearity that can be treated within the inverse obstacle problem. Moreover, the theoretical limits of the methods are provided in the ideal case of noise-free measurements: outer-support reconstruction when $p=2$, and convex-hull reconstruction when $p\neq2$.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Switched Turn-based Adaptive Source Seeking Strategy using Estimation and Information-driven Direction of Improvement

Source seeking arises in applications such as gas leak localization, radiation monitoring, and environmental surveillance, where the origin of an unknown signal field must be estimated from spatial measurements. In practice, the source location is not directly observable and must be inferred from noisy scalar measurements collected during motion.In robotic source seeking, estimation and motion are closely linked: measurements improve the source estimate, while the chosen trajectory affects the quality of future measurements.Existing loop-based geometric strategies generate feasible motion but do not explicitly use estimation uncertainty to regulate direction updates.This paper presents a loop-based source-seeking framework that combines Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) estimation with Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based direction selection. The source estimate is updated during motion, and the heading is changed at loop boundaries using both estimation uncertainty and predicted information gain. A measurement-based stopping condition is used to detect convergence without requiring prior knowledge of the source location.Simulation results under stationary and moving source scenarios demonstrate improved tracking performance and reduced estimation error compared to purely information-driven or estimate-driven strategies.
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Signal Processing

Curved Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna System (C-PAS): Communication Performance Analysis

Existing studies on the pinching-antenna system (PAS) assume that waveguides are deployed straight, which fails to serve communication regions with curved boundaries. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a curved waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (C-PAS), where the waveguide is placed along the building ceiling in an arc to maximize the line-of-sight (LoS) coverage. On this basis, the optimal pinching-antenna (PA) placement strategy and the nearest PA placement strategy are presented. The optimal strategy distinguishes between scenarios, i.e., with or without inner-wall blockage, and derives a closed-form solution for the optimal PA position to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) received at the user. Meanwhile, the nearest strategy aligns the PA with the angular position of a user in polar coordinates, thereby accommodating the curved geometry of the region. Furthermore, the outage probability (OP) and the average rate (AR) are analyzed for each strategy, and the corresponding analytical expressions are derived, respectively. The results show that the optimal PA placement strategy achieves better OP and AR performance than the nearest strategy, particularly under large waveguide loss coefficient or waveguide height. Moreover, for a service region of fixed area, there exists an optimal sector angle or inner-wall radius that either minimizes the outage probability or maximizes the average rate. Furthermore, the choice of a waveguide bending radius is influenced by the transmit power of the base station, where a smaller bending radius is preferable at high power and the middle arc performs best at low power.
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All authors Yayun Qu, Kunrui Cao, Tao Wang, Lu Lv, Jiwei Tian, Dimitrios Tyrovolas, Panagiotis D. Diamantoulakis, George K. Karagiannidis

Signal Processing

Centralized RAN for Future Low-Power Wide-Area Networks: A LoRa Case Study

In recent years, low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies have gained significant traction as a connectivity option for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. While these networks have been successful in providing long-range, low-power, and low-cost connectivity, they currently face scalability, reliability, and efficiency challenges that require immediate attention. In this paper, we first identify important challenges for LPWANs. We then advocate for the introduction of a centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture tailored for LPWANs and present a proof-of-concept implementation and deployment of the proposed C-RAN for the widely popular long range (LoRa) standard. We also provide experimental results to demonstrate and quantify the increased sensitivity that can be obtained from joint processing of the baseband signals of multiple receivers, enabled by the proposed centralized architecture in quasi-static scenarios and drone-mounted transmitters.
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All authors Joachim Tapparel, Amavi Dossa, El Mehdi Amhoud, Andreas Burg

Signal Processing

Simultaneous Indoor and Outdoor Coverage with Conformal Intelligent Omni-Surface

Seamless indoor–outdoor coverage conventionally relies on coordinated outdoor macro cells and indoor small cells, incurring high deployment and backhaul costs. Intelligent omni-surfaces (IOSs) provide a promising alternative by enabling simultaneous reflection and transmission across building boundaries. Enabled by recent advances in conformal antennas, conformal IOSs (CIOSs) mounted on building facades offer a flexible and deployment-friendly solution for integrated indoor–outdoor coverage. This paper develops a stochastic-geometry framework to evaluate the downlink performance of CIOS-assisted networks serving both indoor and outdoor users. Specifically, a building-dependent spatial model is established where randomly located buildings are modeled via a Boolean scheme with CIOSs mounted on their facades. Unlike planar IOS deployment, conformal integration introduces geometry dependent visibility constraints, which are captured through the effective numbers of participating elements defined by visible arc metrics for reflection and transmission. Incorporating these constraints, coverage probability expressions are derived under three CIOS operating protocols. Numerical results show that, compared with planar IOS, CIOS improves the successful connection probabilities of the reflected and transmitted links by up to 75% and 125%, respectively, while the overall coverage gain remains dependent on blockage conditions because curvature reduces the effective serving aperture.
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All authors Yiqi Chen, Xiaoming She, Jianchi Zhu, Nanxi Li, Ruizhe Long, Ying-Chang Liang

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

Channel-Token Attention for Reliable Dynamic Spectrum Access under Bursty Primary-User Traffic

Dynamic spectrum access must coordinate secondary users under bursty primary-user activity while preserving packet reliability and delay. We present TACAN, a centralized policy that represents each channel as a token containing occupancy history and automatic-modulation-classification entropy; a context token supplies queue class, delay and user identity. A Transformer encoder is warm-started from an occupancy-greedy policy and refined with proximal policy optimization. The frozen policies were trained to maintain a channel assignment in every slot, including when queues were empty. We therefore replay them on held-out trajectories and distinguish standby assignment success from packet-present access and packet delivery. In a 20-channel network with 60 primary devices and 4 secondary users, TACAN achieves 92.53% +/- 0.47 packet-present access success, compared with 89.94% for Greedy and 83.53% for PPO+MLP. Its paired gain over Greedy is 2.59 points (parametric 95% CI 1.89-3.29), with wins in all five seeds; the exact two-sided sign-test value is 0.0625. The gain rises from 0.57 points at normal primary-user load to 7.67 points at extreme load. TACAN also reduces mean delivery delay from 1.208 to 1.123 slots and the conditional user-reliability gap from 9.69 to 3.15 points. Delivered packets per SU-slot remain arrival-limited (30.12% versus 30.11%), so no packet-throughput gain is claimed.
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All authors Krishna Acharya, Dinanath Padhya, Utsab Dahal, Ashish Kandel, Binod Sapkota

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

CSymPlan: Certified Symbolic Planning and Control for High-DOF Manipulators

Robot manipulators are commonly engineered around a decoupled motion-generation stack: a planner computes a collision-free path and a lower-level controller tracks the resulting reference. This separation is computationally convenient, but it can produce references that are difficult to execute under actuator limits, tracking error, model mismatch, and small obstacle clearances. We present CSymPlan, a certified symbolic planning and control framework for high-DOF manipulators with two complementary implementations: an offline implementation that precomputes certified reach-avoid feedback policies for known workspaces; and an online implementation that synthesizes or updates symbolic policies at runtime from changing task and perception information using parallelization. The offline implementation reduces the manipulator dynamics to a sampled perturbed double-integrator model in operational space through feedback linearization, treats torque-realization errors, modeling inaccuracies, and measurement uncertainty as bounded disturbances, and refines the synthesized symbolic policy to the Franka FR3 through a quantization–lookup–torque realization pipeline. The online implementation uses the same abstraction and refinement interface, but replaces the precomputed policy table with a runtime pFaces request–synthesis–execution loop. In randomized simulated benchmarks and perception-driven Franka FR3 experiments, both implementations complete reach-avoid tasks with zero safety violations; whenever no certified action exists, the robot holds, replans, or stops safely instead of executing an uncertified command.
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All authors Aditya Narendra, Ashok Kumar Saini, Mahathi Anand, Mahmoud Khaled, Fares J. Abu-Dakka, Abdalla Swikir

Signal Processing

AirMoE: Realizing Over-the-Air Distributed Mixture-of-Experts Inference at the Wireless Edge

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures enable efficient large language model (LLM) inference at the wireless edge through sparse activation. The wireless distributed MoE (WIDE) architecture addresses edge-resource constraints by distributing experts across devices coordinated by an edge server. However, WIDE suffers from repeated uplink transmissions of high-dimensional expert outputs via orthogonal multiple access. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose AirMoE, an over-the-air computing (AirComp)-enabled framework for simultaneous expert-output aggregation via wireless waveform superposition. Integrating AirComp into MoE inference introduces three challenges: fast-varying aggregation weights, layer-dependent error sensitivity, and channel-aware expert placement. To address these challenges, we construct an inference-aware AirMoE error metric to quantify aggregation distortion effects on end-to-end (E2E) inference accuracy via perturbation-based layer-sensitivity calibration. We then formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize this error and decompose it, without loss of optimality, into a two-timescale framework. At the fast timescale, we derive a globally optimal threshold-based power-control policy that separates devices into coefficient-aligned and full-power groups. At the slow timescale, we develop an activation- and channel-aware expert placement strategy that assigns more important experts to devices with lower channel-power cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AirMoE outperforms representative baselines in E2E inference accuracy, especially under strong device heterogeneity.
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Signal Processing

Rethinking the Foundations of Two-Sided AI Models for 6G

For next-generation air interfaces, two-sided artificial intelligence (AI) models have received growing attention, with AI models deployed at both the transmitter and receiver for efficient channel feedback and data communication. However, their practical deployment is complicated by assumptions commonly made in existing studies, including isolation from legacy users, training under predefined channel conditions, and gradient-based fine-tuning requiring substantial cross-vendor communication. This article revisits these assumptions and presents practical alternatives. First, for legacy coexistence, we integrate two-sided model processing into the 5G New Radio (NR) protocol stack and validate its operation alongside conventional NR on a real-world testbed. Second, instead of training under a massive number of predefined channel conditions, we construct a compact model table by jointly optimizing two-sided models with trainable surrogate channels, and select the best model according to the current channel condition to enable channel adaptation with high task performance and low training/storage overhead. Finally, unlike existing fine-tuning that exchanges large gradient vectors containing potentially private model information, we present gradient-free zeroth-order fine-tuning that requires only scalar feedback, facilitating multi-vendor interoperability. Together, these approaches advance the practical deployment of two-sided AI models while highlighting key open challenges.
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All authors Yongjeong Oh, Zihan Chen, Timothy J. O'Shea, Junyong Shin, Jinho Choi, Yo-Seb Jeon, Jihong Park

Audio and Speech Processing

Unsupervised Speech Recognition at the Syllable Level

Training speech recognizers with unpaired speech and text – known as unsupervised speech recognition (UASR) – is a crucial step toward extending ASR to low-resource languages in the long-tail distribution and enabling multimodal learning from non-parallel data. However, existing approaches based on phones often rely on costly resources such as grapheme-to-phoneme converters (G2Ps) and struggle to generalize to languages with ambiguous phoneme boundaries due to training instability. In this paper, we address both challenges by introducing a syllable-level UASR framework based on masked language modeling, which avoids the need for G2P and the instability of GAN-based methods. Our approach achieves up to a 40% relative reduction in character error rate (CER) on LibriSpeech and generalizes effectively to low-resource languages that have remained particularly difficult for prior methods. Code is publicly available\footnote{https://github.com/cactuswiththoughts/SylCipher}.
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All authors Liming Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Kunio Kashino, David Harwath, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, James R. Glass

Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Better Retrieval, Worse Robustness: How Multi-hop RAG Amplifies Upstream ASR Errors

Speech-based applications pass spoken queries through automatic speech recognition (ASR) before any retrieval module, so ASR errors enter the pipeline as a fixed upstream constraint. We empirically test whether two extensions to standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), entity-graph linking and iterative reformulation, absorb or amplify these errors. Using four English accents synthesized through neural TTS, we evaluate four RAG configurations on three multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA and MuSiQue) against a clean-text oracle. Although the structurally richer configurations generally retain higher absolute F1 under ASR input, both extensions amplify the error: the F1 gap from clean text to the highest-WER accent is 36-67% larger under their combination than under naive dense retrieval, on all three benchmarks. The dominant failure mode is corruption of one or more query entities, accounting for 87-96% of degradation cases on 2WikiMultiHopQA across all four methods. Two lightweight surface-form mitigations leave most of the gap intact, indicating that downstream retrieval structure amplifies remaining entity errors. We release code and data at https://github.com/Continuum-AI-Corp/spoken-multihop-rag .
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Signal Processing

IMNet: Intercarrier Interference Mitigation Network for Integrated Sensing and Communication in Spectrally Efficient FDM Systems

Spectrally efficient frequency-division multiplexing (SEFDM) is an attractive waveform to improve communication spectral efficiency by compressing the subcarrier spacing, yet its use for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) poses a fundamental sensing challenge. Specifically, the intentional loss of subcarrier orthogonality generates SEFDM-induced intercarrier interference (S-ICI), which combines with Doppler-induced ICI (D-ICI) from moving targets to blur range–velocity maps and severely degrade sensing accuracy. Building on multi-user multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) SEFDM systems, this paper develops a model-driven ISAC framework that supports spectrally efficient multi-user communication while mitigating both S-ICI and D-ICI in sensing. To this end, an intercarrier interference mitigation network (IMNet) is proposed, which exploits the distinct physical structures of the two interferences. A bank of Doppler correction filters first compensates the velocity-dependent D-ICI over multiple Doppler hypotheses, and an axial-attention network subsequently suppresses the residual D-ICI and the long-range S-ICI to recover reliable sensing signals. To further improve range and velocity estimation accuracy, IMNet with local refinement (IMNet-LR) is proposed, which performs maximum-likelihood refinement with nuisance projection around the IMNet detections to achieve sub-cell precision without an exhaustive global search. Simulation results show that IMNet-LR achieves near-maximum-likelihood range and velocity estimation accuracy with more than three orders of magnitude lower execution time compared to conventional detection methods.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Reproducible Vision-Guided 6-DoF Robotic Manipulator with a Mixed Stepper-Driver Architecture and Browser-Native Control

We present the NeuralNexus Arm, an open, low-cost 6-DOF robotic manipulator built by an undergraduate engineering team, together with the design decisions and debugging experience needed to reproduce it. The arm is driven by a single STM32H743 microcontroller on a custom printed circuit board (PCB) and combines two stepper-driver strategies on one controller: push-pull 3.3 V step/direction outputs for onboard TMC2209 drivers on the three wrist joints, and open-drain outputs for external CL57T and DM542 drivers on the three high-torque proximal joints. We describe the mechanical design, mixed-driver electronics, interrupt-driven firmware, a MATLAB/Simscape-based inverse-kinematics pipeline, a browser-native control interface using the Web Serial API, and a lightweight vision pipeline for object localisation and autonomous pick-and-place tasks. We also document non-obvious hardware and firmware failure modes encountered during the transition from a development board to the custom PCB as reproducibility guidance. All design files and firmware are released openly. The platform actuates all six axes under coordinated control at a 2 kHz update rate and executes both manual and pre-recorded motions from the browser interface.
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All authors Lasan Perera, Deneth Priyadarshana, Dulana Pitiwaduge, Isitha Dinujaya, Mokshan Colambage

Audio and Speech Processing

DiaScriber: A Speech LLM for Joint Diarization and Transcription in Multi-Speaker Scenarios

Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MSASR) aims to jointly predict content transcriptions, speaker identities, and timestamps, thereby addressing the key question of "who spoke what and when" and holds substantial practical value in real-world multi-speaker scenarios. However, MSASR still encounters considerable challenges in the presence of fast turn transitions, overlapping speech, and complex, diverse multi-speaker scenarios. In this work, we propose DiaScriber, an end-to-end multi-speaker diarization and transcription model built on a speech large language model. We first construct diverse data pipelines to cover a wide variety of multi-speaker scenarios and their complexities, including validation and refinement, turn-transition and overlapping-speech simulation, and multimodal annotation. Furthermore, DiaScriber is developed based on the pretrained version of Qwen3.5-Omni through a three-stage training strategy involving continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments show that DiaScriber achieves superior performance over comparison methods across extensive multi-speaker scenario test sets and demonstrates outstanding generalization ability in unseen multi-speaker scenarios.
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All authors Bingshen Mu, Xian Shi, Xiong Wang, Zhifang Guo, Ting He, Xize Cheng, Yu Xi, Jin Xu, Lei Xie

Image and Video Processing

Interpretable Landsat-to-Hyperspectral Dual Super-Resolution Without Large Matrix Inversion

Direct acquisition of global hyperspectral images (HSIs) is infeasible given contemporary hardware facilities and limited resources, while global hyperspectral monitoring is critical for remote sensing applications. A more economical approach is to interpretably convert global Landsat-8/9 multispectral images into NASA's AVIRIS-level HSIs. This conversion involves both spatial super-resolution (SpaSR, 30-m to 15-m) and the highly ill-posed spectral super-resolution (SpeSR, 7-band to 172-band), collectively referred to as dual super-resolution (DualSR), whose duality between SpaSR and SpeSR has recently been established. Existing SpeSR methods, mostly designed to reconstruct CAVE-level HSIs with only 31 visible bands, are not applicable to the AVIRIS-level task involving 172 visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared bands. This motivates us to customize an interpretable alternating direction method of multipliers network (ADMM-Net) using the Woodbury W-Lemma and a spectral continuity prior. Unlike conventional generative SpaSR, we employ a panchromatic sharpening strategy to recover physically grounded spatial details. However, this strategy induces very large matrix inversions (LMIs), with dimensionality proportional to the number of pixels, even after applying the W-Lemma. We resolve this issue by designing an LMI-free proximal gradient descent network (PGD-Net). Consequently, the proposed PGD-ADMM interpretable network (PAINT) achieves substantial improvements in both computational complexity and reconstruction performance. Beyond state-of-the-art reconstruction performance, PAINT improves Landsat classification from 78.98% accuracy and 76.06% kappa to 92.16% accuracy and 90.98% kappa.
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All authors Chia-Hsiang Lin, Jian-Kai Huang, Si-Sheng Young, Wei-Cheng Zheng

Systems and Control

Generative Design of Liquid-Cooling Channels for Thermal Management of 2.5D and 3D Integrated Advanced Packaging

High-power multi-chip packages require increasingly effective cooling as intensive heat is generated within a limited package area. This work presents a physics-guided generative design framework for liquid-cooling channel topology optimization in a 2.7 kW multi-chip package containing two high-power graphics processing units (GPUs) and one central processing unit (CPU). A conditional diffusion model generates symmetric channel layouts using maximum GPU temperature, GPU temperature spread, and pressure drop as performance targets. Generated designs undergo connectivity and dead-end-branch screening and are evaluated using a calibrated reduced-order thermal-fluids model. Based on 5,000 generated layouts, the multi-objective analysis identified the optimal design for thermal properties, with estimated maximum GPU temperature of 70.30 degree Celsius, GPU temperature spread of 24.90 degree Celsius, and pressure drop of 89.72 kPa. Compared to a conventional reference topology, the optimal design reduced the maximum GPU temperature, temperature spread, and pressure drop by 33.6%, 52.5%, and 72.8%, respectively. High-fidelity three-dimensional conjugate heat-transfer simulation in OpenFOAM estimated a maximum GPU temperature of 66.70 degree Celsius and a pressure drop of 92.1 kPa, showing only differences of 8.6% in temperature rise and 2.6% in pressure drop. The results demonstrate that physics-guided generative design based on the reduced-order model can efficiently discover unconventional cooling channel architectures while reducing reliance on repeating computationally expensive simulation.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from physics.soc-ph

The Loop-Gain Matrix: Coupled Rebalancing Feedback and the Blind Spots of Scalar Stability Monitoring

The stability of markets hosting leveraged exchange-traded products is governed not by any single product's loop gain but by the spectral radius of a loop-gain matrix, and scalar per-product monitoring underestimates system feedback by construction. Recent work measures the self-reinforcement of a leveraged fund's daily close rebalancing through a scalar loop gain and treats cross-asset spillovers as bias. We model complexes on correlated underlyings as a coupled feedback system with matrix gain L and show that scalar monitoring has two blind spots: (i) cycle amplification, since rho(L) >= max_i l_ii for nonnegative coupling, strict under two-way coupling; and (ii) transmitted displacement, which arises already under one-way coupling and is invisible to the receiver's own gain. We give a reduced-form estimator of L requiring only prices and public fund assets – no signed order flow – via cross-asset overnight reversals, reporting its measurement-convention sensitivity explicitly. In simulation the spectral radius is recovered with RMSE 0.005 at T=250, a lead-lag confounder yields a 2% false-alarm rate, and in a calibrated blind-spot configuration the scalar monitor reports "safe" and the matrix monitor "unsafe" on 100% of paths. In the 2026 Korean single-stock LETF episode we detect transmission from the SK Hynix complex into Samsung Electronics' closing price (DiD z=-2.82; exact randomization p=0.0055 against 182 control pairs), scaling with the sender's rebalancing capital; conservatively, about 41% of Samsung's closing displacement variance is imported – invisible to its own "moderate" gain of 0.24. The same estimator returns nulls for the U.S. MSTR-Bitcoin-Coinbase complex, whose capital is comparable but whose closing venue is far deeper. Monitoring should be organized around the (complex x venue) matrix, not around products.
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Systems and Control

Real-Time Edge-based Detection of Correlated AI Data-Center Load Episodes

Artificial-intelligence data centers running bulk-synchronous training can impose sub-second power swings. When several facilities synchronize their training cycles, these load variations become spatially correlated and amplify the aggregate disturbance on the grid. A grid operator without access to data-center telemetry must infer this correlation from electrical measurements alone. However, the required observation time and the feasibility of detection on substation-deployable hardware remain uncharacterized. This paper develops a correlation-based detection method to classify the multi-facility operating regime from cross-facility power measurements. Analytical derivations and experimental validation show that the resulting detection confidence increases with the observation-window length at a rate governed by the load correlation time. The method is demonstrated in a real-time hardware-in-the-loop testbed, where load setpoints generated from a validated semi-Markov data-center load model are applied to an electromagnetic-transient grid simulation on a Real-Time Digital Simulator. A compact classifier built on pairwise power correlations runs on an edge device in this loop and determines whether the data-center load variations are independent or spatially correlated. The cross-facility correlation separates the independent and correlated cases across independent realizations. The held-out detection accuracy improves with the observation window, consistent with the predicted relation. A raw-waveform network fails to generalize, supporting pairwise correlation as the discriminative signal. The detector executes in real time on commodity edge hardware. A closed-loop demonstration against the running simulator tracks a regime change within one observation window.
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All authors Chandan Chaudhary, Abanish Tiwari, Yansong Pei, Mohammed Ben-Idris, Joydeep Mitra

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

General-Sum Linear Regulator Games for Positive Systems

This paper studies a continuous-time general-sum non-cooperative game with linear costs, positive linear system dynamics, and elementwise linear input constraints. In the finite-horizon case, we present a verification theorem characterizing feedback Nash equilibria, in terms of absolutely continuous solutions of a coupled system of vector-valued ordinary differential equations, realized by time-varying feedback laws. Unlike linear-quadratic differential games, whose Riccati-based equilibria scale quadratically with the state dimension, this formulation scales linearly. However, the resulting piecewise-constant feedback saturates between its constraint bounds rather than varying smoothly, and additional mathematical challenges arise when characterizing the solutions of the differential equations, which are generally discontinuous due to the switching nature of the feedback gains. In this work, we study the case where switching occurs only at isolated time instants. In the infinite-horizon case, under stabilizability assumptions, the equilibrium is characterized by coupled vector-valued algebraic equations. For this game, we propose iterative methods to compute both finite and infinite-horizon equilibria. The approach is illustrated through a large-scale pollution game.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Unit-to-Plant Stability Shaping of Multi-Electrolyzer ReP2H Plants via Interface Design and Dispatch

Alkaline water electrolysis (AWE) units supplied by insulated gate bipolar transistor rectifiers (IGBT-Rs) may experience oscil-lations caused by coupling between rectifier control and electro-lyzer (ELZ) dynamics. Because this risk varies with unit loading and power allocation, production-oriented dispatch may place a multi-ELZ renewable power-to-hydrogen (ReP2H) plant near or exceed its stability boundary. This paper proposes a stability-oriented framework for control design and plant production dis-patch. A three-port admittance model links the ac port, dc link, and electrolysis stack. Unit-level dc-port analysis quantifies the effects of loading, temperature, Buck bandwidth, and dc-link capacitance, while plant-level aggregation evaluates how unit commitment and power allocation affect stability. Results show that higher loading reduces stability, whereas larger dc-link ca-pacitance and higher Buck bandwidth improve it. Under the same plant loading, different power allocations result in different plant-level stability margins, with balanced allocation generally providing a larger margin than concentrated allocation. The plant-level model thus distinguishes the stability margins of ad-missible schedules. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tests validate these trends and the proposed redistribution rule. The resulting operating regions and dispatch rules can be used to screen unit commitment and power allocation decisions in plant production scheduling.
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All authors Miao Zhang, Yiwei Qiu, Xiaoyu Wang, Linlin Wu, Yi Zhou, Shi Chen, Buxiang Zhou, Kaigui Xie

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.DS

Identifying Probability Localization Dynamics via Structured Stochastic Liftings

This work develops a discrete-time framework for identifying probability localization dynamics through finite stochastic representations adapted in space, time, memory, and state information. A compact dynamically relevant set is localized by a finite measurable partition, producing an observable probability state and a relational graph of admissible transitions. Structured stochastic liftings derived from Stochastically Structured Reservoir Computing (SSRC) give lossless polynomial representations of the observable state, while stochastic delay liftings add finite observable memory. These are distinguished from dynamically informed state-space enrichment: refinement of observational fibers containing states with the same present observation but different observable futures, yielding an exact obstruction-to-closure criterion. A route-network toy problem gives a minimal obstruction example, while four numerical laboratories (rotational phase dynamics, the chaotic logistic map, the Van der Pol oscillator, and a synthetic cyclic inventory system) show how spatial scale, temporal scale, polynomial degree, and delay depth interact. The logistic map isolates representation-induced memory in an otherwise Markovian chaotic system, using its exact invariant law as an ergodic benchmark and its zero-mass pseudospectrum to separate relaxation from transient amplification. An exact rotational cycle calibrates pseudospectra as a robustness diagnostic rather than a closure certificate. The inventory example gives a closure-driven enrichment procedure: residence-age hazards trigger age-refined states that improve predictive scores. These results motivate a minimal adequate representation: the least complex representation meeting predictive, structural, and identifiability requirements.
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Sunday 23 August

Image and Video Processing

Local SVD-Entropy Maps as a Complementary Structural Representation for Full-Reference and No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

We investigate a local spectral-complexity representation for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) based on Shannon entropy of singular values computed directly from two-dimensional image patches. For each $3\times3$-pixel grayscale patch, SVD is applied directly and the normalized singular-value entropy defines one HSVD-map value. The construction requires neither flattening nor delay embedding, uses no boundary padding, and is invariant to $90^{\circ}$ rotations and mirror reflections at the local-descriptor level. A nested salt-and-pepper experiment on Lena separates absolute similarity to a clean reference from sensitivity to an additional degradation step. HSVD-SSIM responds more strongly to local corruption and retains a larger neighboring-state response at severe noise levels. Validation on all 10,125 distorted KADID-10k images shows that HSVD-SSIM is weaker than conventional SSIM as a standalone full-reference metric (SRCC $0.450$ vs. $0.619$), but complementary when combined with it: grouped cross-validation increases SRCC from $0.618$ to $0.659$, with a bootstrap 95% confidence interval of $[0.036,0.046]$ for the gain. In a no-reference experiment, adding HSVD-derived single-image descriptors improves the best nonlinear model from SRCC $0.528$ to $0.575$ (95% CI $[0.033,0.061]$) and also improves prediction of quality changes between neighboring distortion states. These results support direct local SVD entropy as an interpretable structural channel that complements conventional image-domain similarity and remains informative without a pristine reference.
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Systems and Control

ST-Topo GAN: A Motor EEG-to-EMG Decoding Model Matched to Wrist Movement Complexity

The wrist plays a critical role in upper-limb function by enabling precise hand positioning, force regulation, and object manipulation. Continuous brain–muscle interfaces (BMIs) offer a promising approach for motor restoration by decoding neural activity into muscle activation signals. However, existing EEG-to-EMG models have mainly been developed for tasks with relatively stable muscle synergies and may be less effective for the heterogeneous and weakly coupled neuromuscular organisation involved in wrist movements. This paper proposes ST-Topo GAN, a Spatial–Temporal Topological Generative Adversarial Network for continuous EEG-to-EMG decoding of wrist movements. The framework integrates multi-band EEG representation, sensorimotor cortical topology modelling, and conditional adversarial learning to reconstruct multi-channel iEMG activation. The model was evaluated through cross-task comparison, wrist EEG-to-iEMG decoding, and ablation experiments. Compared with the WAY-EEG-GAL grasp-and-lift dataset, the wrist dataset exhibited lower inter-muscle activation similarity and greater decoding difficulty for conventional models. ST-Topo GAN achieved an average PCC of 0.4436 on the wrist dataset, outperforming all evaluated baselines, while the ablation study confirmed the contribution of its key components. These results support the effectiveness of ST-Topo GAN for continuous wrist EEG-to-iEMG decoding.
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All authors Ye Sun, Mingxuan Qu, Jing Wang, Dezhong Yao, Gang Liu

Image and Video Processing

Modality Contribution Score - A Per-Patient Framework for Quantifying the Relative Diagnostic Contribution of Structural MRI and Amyloid PET in Alzheimer's Disease

Multimodal neuroimaging combining structural MRI and positron emission tomography (PET) captures complementary structure-function relationships across the Alzheimer's disease (AD) continuum, yet existing artificial intelligence systems produce a single diagnostic label without quantifying which imaging modality drove that decision for a specific patient. We introduce the Modality Contribution Network (MCNet) and the Modality Contribution Score (MCS), the first per-patient attribution framework quantifying the shift in modality dominance from structural atrophy to amyloid and metabolic dysfunction across the cognitively normal to MCI to AD continuum. MCS is normalised to unity per subject via modality ablation (MCS_MRI_i + MCS_PET_i = 1.0 for every subject i), providing an interpretable, clinically actionable score that fluid biomarkers cannot supply. Applied to 327 ADNI-3 participants balanced across cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, and AD groups, MCNet achieved competitive three-class staging performance (AUC=0.881). The MCS revealed a statistically significant monotonic gradient (Kruskal-Wallis p<0.0001), with increasing PET dominance from cognitively normal (MCS_PET 0.412+/-0.229) through MCI (0.489+/-0.289) to AD (0.671+/-0.426), validated against amyloid SUVR (r=0.172, p=0.006) and FDG metabolic biomarkers (r=-0.287, p=0.0005) from separate imaging pipelines. External replication in 1,073 independent OASIS-3 subjects confirmed cross-cohort generalisability (H=166.99, p<0.0001, eta^2=0.156). A mechanistic comparison with SHAP demonstrated that ablation-based MCS captures clinically meaningful modality dependence that deviation-based methods cannot. These findings position MCNet as a foundation for personalised imaging decisions, clinical trial stratification, and trustworthy AI in dementia care.
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All authors Dawa Chyophel Lepcha, Aaliya Ali, Sophie A. Martin, Deepika Koundal, Pierrick Coupe, Shabbir Syed-Abdul

Systems and Control

Expanding the Transient Stability Region of Attraction of Networked Grid-Interactive Inverters: A Probabilistic Active Learning Framework

The continuous integration of inverter-based resources makes transient stability analysis increasingly important for power system modernization, in light of the intricate dynamics arising from large-scale inverter deployment. However, analytical transient stability analysis methods consistently yield overly conservative stability boundary estimates, which constrain grid dispatch and operational flexibility. Although recent neural Lyapunov methods attempt to enlarge these stability boundaries to obtain less conservative estimates, they remain trapped within restricted domains due to the out-of-distribution problem. To break this bottleneck, this paper proposes a probabilistic active learning framework. Starting from a deterministic inner stability region certified by neural Lyapunov functions, the framework constructs a Gaussian process surrogate and deploys an uncertainty-guided frontier search. By intelligently coupling electromagnetic transient simulations with active boundary exploration, the algorithm systematically drives the estimated stability boundary outward. Comprehensive evaluations across multi-machine grid-forming benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially reduces estimation conservatism. Across test systems ranging up to four interconnected grid-forming inverters, the methodology achieves up to a $20$-fold volumetric enlargement of the certified stability region over classical baselines, while requiring at most 220 time-domain simulation queries per system, far fewer than the 1,600 queries that exhaustive EMT evaluation demands even for the simplest single-inverter benchmark.
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All authors Zhong Liu, Jialin Zheng, Junjie Qin, Xiaonan Lu