Papers

Ensuring the security of complex systems involves the strategic allocation of defensive resources to prevent various types of attacks from succeeding. A defender often has multiple types of defensive assets at its disposal, where it must decide how to optimally deploy their heterogeneous capabilities across different attack types. In this paper, we formulate a multi-resource allocation problem in the form of a General Lotto game where a defender possesses various types of resources. A feature that we introduce is that their individual effectiveness against different types of attacks is characterized by a network weight matrix. In our analysis, we derive upper and lower bounds on the performance of the defender, and provide numerical evidence suggesting that they are tight. For the case of two attack types, we analytically prove that the bounds coincide, establishing an exact equilibrium characterization. We then numerically compare our proposed networked multi-resource architecture to an independent-defense benchmark from the existing literature. These results highlight fundamental and tractable structures underlying multi-attack-type defense problems.

Latest JPEG restoration systems achieve strong quality with large models, yet often remain too slow and expensive for efficient on-device deployment. We present a 65M-parameter generative restorer that attains the lowest LPIPS at QF 10 and 20 on LIVE-1, Urban100, and DIV2K-val while sustaining 8.05 images/s at $1024\times1024$ on a single RTX 3090, roughly $4.9\times$ the reported throughput of one-step SODiff at one-twentieth of its parameters. Trained from scratch, the model replaces the learned VAE encoder-decoder with an exactly invertible two-level Haar transform, predicts a clean wavelet-domain residual through a rank-enhanced linear-attention DiT that estimates compression severity internally, and is optimized with an improved MeanFlow objective that enables inference in one or two network evaluations without distillation. Large pretrained priors remain stronger under severe compression (QF 5), whereas our model prioritizes throughput for deployment-constrained restoration.

Video world models increasingly serve as data engines, action planners, and simulators for embodied AI, but conventional embodied world model (EWM) benchmarks lack a unified 3D-grounded protocol for establishing whether generated rollouts preserve the underlying 3D scene state or translate into executable actions. We introduce RoboPhys-3D, a 3D-grounded EWM benchmark built on RoboTwin 2.0, covering 50 manipulation tasks across four regimes, with 5,000 episodes and 25,000 multi-view ground-truth videos. A defining feature of RoboPhys-3D is that generated and ground-truth videos are processed through the same 3D reconstruction pipeline, enabling reconstruction-induced error to be distinguished from generation-induced error. The RoboPhys-3D benchmark organizes 50 complementary metrics into 18 sub-dimensions across four levels: pixel-level fidelity, 3D geometry consistency, state-level understanding, and task-level completeness. We further introduce Average Full Score, a hierarchical score averaging all 50 metrics for comprehensive evaluation, and RoboPhyscore, a compact task-aligned score averaging the metrics most strongly correlated with task success. Among the four representative video world models, Cosmos 3 achieves the highest RoboPhyscore (0.6330, 92.7% of ground truth), while state- and execution-grounded metrics reveal substantial failures that perceptual and vision-language model-based judgments fail to capture. RoboPhyscore further exhibits strong agreement with human evaluation (Pearson r = 0.9761 and Spearman h̊o} = 0.8962), demonstrating the importance of grounded, execution-aware evaluation for EWM capability.

Deep learning segmentation models are often evaluated using geometric metrics such as Dice, HD95, and ASD, yet it remains unclear to what extent improvements in these metrics translate into clinically meaningful changes in downstream decision-making. The metric-to-decision gap is examined using radiological Peritoneal Cancer Index (rPCI) region segmentation on contrast-enhanced CT, where a consensus definition provides anatomically grounded 3D regions and the clinically used PCI 20 threshold enables decision-level evaluation. Inter-observer variability is quantified across four experts on ten abdominal CT scans, and a published nnU-Net based rPCI segmentation model is benchmarked against this human reference using Dice, HD95, and ASD across all 13 regions. To relate geometric differences to clinical impact, a probabilistic peritoneal metastasis simulation is implemented on majority-vote rPCI maps, propagating region-boundary variability into variability of derived (r)PCI scores and classification at the PCI 20 cutoff. Observers showed high agreement (mean Dice $0.87$), while the model matched human performance in most regions but deviated more in regions 4, 8, and the small-bowel regions (9-12). Across simulations, score differences were typically small (mean $\Delta$rPCI $\approx 0.3$-$0.6$) for both observers and the model, and decision flips occurred predominantly when the reference score was near 20. These results suggest that rPCI-derived scoring is generally robust to typical segmentation variability, while highlighting borderline cases as the main setting where expert review remains essential.

Ultrasound-guided interventions can require localization of an untracked 2D frame within a 3D anatomical reference. Rigid slice-to-volume registration (SVR) estimates this six-degree-of-freedom pose but remains challenging because of limited anatomical context, acoustic artifacts, and view-dependent appearance. Existing methods often use dense cross-attention, whose cost scales with the product of slice and volume token counts, or direct pose regression without explicit correspondence constraints. We introduce SCoPE-Reg, combining state-space slice–volume interaction, dense 3D coordinate prediction, and parameter-free weighted Kabsch estimation. On SVR tasks from CAMUS and $\mu$-RegPro, SCoPE-Reg yields mean target registration errors of $0.73$ mm and $2.27$ mm against $1.24$ mm and $2.63$ mm for the state of the art (SOTA), reduces peak error on CAMUS by 56% below SOTA ($12.5\!\to\!5.5$ mm), and registers $100\%$ and $80\%$ of frames within $3$ mm. On CAMUS at $128^2$ it retains the lowest error at increasing pose-perturbation magnitude. It holds $6.49$ M parameters independent of resolution, sustaining $51$ FPS at $512^2$. SCoPE-Reg establishes a SOTA in rigid ultrasound SVR: by coupling correspondence-based accuracy with bounded worst-case error and resolution-independent cost, it becomes viable at native acquisition resolution during intervention, where prior methods trade accuracy, reliability, or frame rate against one another. Supplementary code provided and will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Objective: Deep learning accelerates brain MRI four- to tenfold, but models can erase lesions or synthesize false tissue - failures pixel-averaged metrics like PSNR and SSIM miss. We review whether current evaluation practices detect this blind spot. Methods: Following PRISMA 2020, we searched seven databases without date limits, including 263 studies (1995-2026), appraised them using QUADAS-2 and matched instruments, and synthesized narratively. Categories were derived from titles, abstracts, and controlled vocabulary; reported prevalence figures represent floors. Duplicate screening achieved high agreement (Fleiss kappa = 0.877), as did appraisal (0.788; 0.390 where observable). Extraction is unaudited. Results: Only 18 of 263 studies (6.8%) recorded both a fidelity metric and reader assessment on identical data, leaving the central surrogate unmeasured. Reader studies mostly measured inter-reader agreement, which was weak: fastMRI 2020 concordance reached 0.457 and 0.386 (Kendall W), improving only where SSIM diverged. Erasing a 100 mm3 lacunar infarct shifts global PSNR by 0.03 dB under the stated error model. As the corpus grew fivefold, reader assessments dropped from 32% to 18%, recovering to 21%. Generative models - most associated with hallucination (39%) - were among the least reader-evaluated (11.3%), while self-supervised models reached 47% with zero reader evaluation. Only 5% released code and ran reader studies; none evaluated a model observer; no named dataset covered acute stroke or hemorrhage. Conclusions: On these floors, current evaluation practices cannot certify diagnostic safety. We derive five requirements safety-oriented evaluations must meet.

Objective: Clinical cardiac CT multiphase reconstructions generally provide acceptable image quality in end-diastole (ED) or end-systole (ES) phases, but in other phases may exhibit motion artifacts, especially in the right coronary artery (RCA). This limits ground-truth availability in 4D cardiac CT imaging research. We aim to construct a 4D cardiac CT dataset that is generally suitable to serve as pseudo ground truth. Methods: We propose Coronary Mask Guided Registration (CMGR) to produce a motion-preserved, artifact-reduced, and continuous-time 4D cardiac CT sequence from the clinical multiphase reconstruction of each patient. For artifact reduction, CMGR uses the ED or ES phase as the reference phase and warps the reference volume with deformation fields to produce the sequence. For motion preservation, CMGR registers the reference phase to each non-reference phase of the multiphase reconstruction. To capture the motion of both the RCA and other cardiac structures in each registration, CMGR regularizes RCA masks and incorporates them into image-domain registration. Time-continuity is achieved by interpolating the deformation fields for non-reference phases to arbitrary times. Results: CMGR outperformed representative image-domain registration methods in capturing RCA motion and providing reasonable RCA shape, and showed competitive performance in capturing whole-heart motion. Additionally, CMGR reduced motion artifacts from clinical multiphase reconstructions, and intermediate CMGR frames generally provided plausible transitions between discrete cardiac phases. Conclusion: CMGR provides an effective approach for constructing continuous-time 4D cardiac CT datasets. Significance: The dataset can be used in system design simulations and in reconstruction algorithm development, thereby facilitating advances in cardiac CT imaging.

A code world model accepted by a sampling gate can be exactly right on everything the gate can see and arbitrarily wrong beyond it. We characterize what a certified model can know, and what its errors can cost, when the omission is an annular freeze mode enclosing an unreachable interior. The gate quotient makes the question precise: acceptance-with-certainty determines the model exactly on the reachable query set; beyond reach is gauge. On a minimal ring instrument we prove the extreme case (a wrong-topology filled-disc artifact unfalsifiable by any sampling gate and bitwise harmless at play) and measure, with LLM synthesis across three model families, how one knob (a channel of width gamma) walks the same artifact through three regimes: unfalsifiable-and-harmless, falsifiable-and-costly, and instantly falsified. Three principles organize the empirics. First, danger is topology relative to reach: a channel the planner can use collapses the blind model's exploitation (play cost 1.09 to ~0 over a knee at gamma ~ 0.1), while a hidden channel with the same first Betti number keeps it at full strength (1.12). Second, repair is parameter-bound and sensor-bound: no family recovers the region from outside evidence; from inside, models pose the right topology but cannot pin its parameters, and the posed topology tracks the guiding persistent-homology summary's wrong beta_1 (a sensor with a measured geometric resolution limit), not the truth. Third, mitigation must match the error's dimension and direction: point fences fail against the one-dimensional boundary, a dimension-matched persisted fence collapses exploitation to a two-lesson transient (0.999 to 0.058), and the dual freedom certificate collapses the invented-mode failure symmetrically (1.769 to 0.029). In n dimensions the shell makes misidentification near-certain while the danger stays fully exploitable: the two axes are independent.

This paper studies how an adversary can execute a power system frequency attack by choosing the most effective subset of inverter-based resources (IBRs) as malicious control nodes. During the attack, the adversary controls the attacking devices to destabilize a group of designated target generators. The attack is designed by introducing an unstable oscillatory mode whose eigenvector has large components at the target generators and small components at the compromised IBRs. We formalize the optimal attacker selection problem and present an equivalent mixed-integer quadratically constrained program (MIQCP). To address this combinatorial nonconvex problem, we develop two heuristic algorithms by introducing a ranking metric. The attack process is demonstrated on a modified WSCC 179-bus system, with results verified through nonlinear dynamic simulations. We show that the proposed heuristics find optimal attacking sets in a majority of evaluated scenarios while significantly reducing the required computational time. Scenarios from the ACTIVSg500 system are used to further support our results. Finally, we discuss how selecting different eigenvalues, targets, and numbers of compromised devices impact the attack's severity.

The open radio access network (O-RAN) is evolving toward agentic operation, where large language model (LLM)-driven xApps/rApps generate control proposals under operator intents. However, such proposals may be conflicting, infeasible, or hallucinated, and no existing system jointly provides proposal-independent safety, priority-aware reconciliation, and traceable feedback. To this end, we propose a provably safe arbiter, namely xTRUCE, in the near-real-time (Near-RT) RAN intelligent controller for mitigating multi-xApp conflicts in gNB control. We first develop a structured xApp proposal interface and a three-layer constraint hierarchy that places physical limits and operator-defined rules above relaxable performance targets, alongside a dual-timescale control action space. A two-stage arbitration mechanism then minimizes target shortfalls in the operator-priority order to finalize safe E2 actions within the Near-RT latency budget, while returning conflict certificates to xApps and the operator for renegotiation. Finally, we implement xTRUCE in a multi-cell O-RAN use case, and evaluate its multi-process prototype through simulations with live API-backed LLM xApps and over-the-air experiments on OpenAirInterface/FlexRIC-based O-RAN stacks. Results show that xTRUCE ensures gNB control safety with $100\%$ protected services despite severe proposal hallucinations, achieves priority-consistent performance satisfaction under overload, efficiently guides LLM intent renegotiation via certificates, and keeps a delay-safe E2 control loop.

Quantum sensors are specified by a headline sensitivity, yet applications also demand accuracy and reliability. The dominant limiter of one metric is often known, but no method resolves how interacting mechanisms combine into a signed, per-mechanism budget for each metric. We introduce a framework that computes a sensor's sensitivity, accuracy, and robustness from one open-system simulation and attributes each to its limiting mechanism. For a nitrogen-vacancy diamond ensemble the attribution inverts across metrics: dephasing limits sensitivity, the thermal ground-state shift limits accuracy, and optical leakage limits robustness. At identical sensitivity the recovered-field bias spans $8$ to $1500$\,nT, so tuning to sensitivity alone can miss the accuracy target by two orders of magnitude. The same modeling transfers to a cesium optically pumped magnetometer recording a human magnetocardiogram. As a digital twin, it predicts the gain from addressing each limiter, so sensors can be designed to the required metrics.

Cochlear implants (CI) restore hearing for individuals with severe to profound hearing loss. However, CI users often struggle to understand speech in noisy environments. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown promise in enhancing speech for CI users, yet their high energy demands make them non-ideal for low-power CI processors. Spiking neural networks (SNN), on the other hand, offer comparable performance with significantly lower energy consumption. Hence, we propose a novel SNN inspired by the Deep ACE architecture that simultaneously performs speech enhancement and CI coding. Our model achieves competitive vocoded short-time objective intelligibility (VSTOI) and signal-to-noise ratio improvement (SNRi) scores compared to Deep ACE, while achieving more than a sixfold reduction in energy consumption.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) based on state-space models (SSMs) are increasingly applied to speech processing, but typically operate on pulse-code-modulated (PCM) audio. This constrains deployment on low-power, always-on edge devices, which commonly use single-bit pulse-density-modulated (PDM) micro-electromechanical (MEMS) microphones for their noise robustness, low cost, and variable sampling rates that enable low-power operation. In fact, converting PDM to PCM requires low-pass filtering and decimation, imposing costly overhead on resource-constrained hardware. While prior works have attempted to process PDM signals directly, they require long training times and generalize poorly across sampling rates. In this paper, we show that the SSM has two key properties that remediate these issues: its continuous-time parametrization allows it to produce a consistent representation of the input audio signal, regardless of the modulation strategy and sampling rate, and its long-term memory enables this representation to be aggressively downsampled without needing any anti-aliasing operations. We then propose a novel end-to-end PDM speech processing architecture that uses an SSM to encode the input audio signal into a modulation- and sampling-rate-invariant latent representation. We show that our proposed architecture achieves robust speech classification and enhancement gains at low-power sampling-rates (512 kHz) and similar performance to state-of-the-art algorithms operating on PCM data when tested on standard PDM sampling-rates of 2 MHz. Moreover, we show that the SSM's output can be downsampled by more than 65,000 times, thus significantly reducing the number of processing timesteps in downstream layers.

This paper develops the first distributed cross-layer algorithm for joint congestion control, routing, scheduling, and power control in covert multi-hop, multi-modal wireless networks, where adversarial wardens (Willies) monitor radio modalities via energy detection. The Detection Error Probability (DEP), the probability that a Willie fails to reliably detect ongoing transmissions, is generally non-concave in the transmit powers, making DEP-based covert network optimization challenging. We resolve this by constructing the tightest concave lower bound on the log-DEP, yielding a conservative convex problem that guarantees satisfaction of the original DEP constraints and unifies hard covertness constraints and covertness-utility maximization in a single problem. We develop a Parallel Proximal Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (PP-ADMM) algorithm for the resulting cross-layer problem and prove global Q-linear convergence, i.e., exponentially fast convergence, to the set of optimal solutions under standard regularity conditions. Numerical results confirm linear convergence and demonstrate robust tracking performance under channel fading and Willie mobility.

Cloud robotics relies on the timely uplink of high-volume sensing streams, yet dynamic environments continually shift the feasible combinations of trajectories, active-robot count, and per-robot QoS. Because existing approaches formulate trajectory planning (TP) and radio resource management (RRM) as a single fixed optimization problem, they cannot reconfigure these coupled decisions as conditions evolve, resulting in transient QoS violations. However, evolving operator intents change which quantities-such as the active-robot count and per-robot QoS-are fixed, optimized, or relaxed. Furthermore, the computational cost of evaluating trajectory-dependent wireless conflicts has made it difficult to build large-scale Digital-Twin-in-the-Loop (DITL) testbeds responsive enough for such dynamic orchestration. We present LUCID, an LLM-agent–orchestrated, uplink-aware cloud-robotics pipeline that moves TP–RRM from solving a fixed formulation to dynamically orchestrating optimization problem schemas within a DITL environment. Driven by the operator's high-level intent, LUCID treats the TP–RRM formulation as a bounded template whose variables, objectives, and constraints are dynamically configured, while SimBridge enables repeated ray-tracing evaluation by converting large-scale robotics scenes into wireless-ready DTs. By integrating collision-free path planning with a spectral-radius RRM validator, LUCID identifies wireless bottlenecks and restructures the problem schema on the fly to efficiently find the verified feasible state. Experiments confirm that LUCID robustly adapts to changing intents, active-robot counts, and scenes, while a multimodal surrogate model, FastConfigNet, reduces planning latency.

Event cameras generate asynchronous, sparse data streams with microsecond temporal resolution, but in moderate-to-high motion scenes they can produce as many as hundreds of millions of events per second, creating significant bandwidth and storage challenges. Lossy compression is therefore essential for practical deployment, yet existing event stream distortion metrics fail to reliably predict compression-induced degradation at the task level, forcing codec optimization to rely on expensive task-specific evaluations. To address this gap, this paper introduces two fundamentally different event compression pipelines: i) an aggregation-based pipeline that converts the event stream into polarity-based histogram frames for compression with the conventional image codec JPEG 2000, and ii) a frame-free point cloud-based pipeline that codes events natively as 3D points using the octree-based codec G-PCC. Both pipelines are then assessed within a unified task-driven evaluation framework that relates event stream distortion to downstream application performance across four representative tasks: i) video reconstruction, ii) object detection, iii) optical flow estimation, and a delay-sensitive task iv) asynchronous feature tracking under a reference-relative protocol. Building on this framework, five classification-based distortion metrics are applied to event compression for the first time, to the best of the authors' knowledge, and benchmarked against existing event stream metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metrics reliably predict compression-induced task degradation across different coding frameworks. This demonstrates that event stream distortion assessment can be an efficient alternative to repeated task-specific evaluation, providing direct guidance for the development and optimization of future event data coding solutions.

Separating individual musical instruments within a complex mixture of sounds poses a persistent challenge for listeners with hearing loss. Although spatial separation of sources improves speech recognition in this population, the potential benefits of spatial cue enhancement for music perception remain largely unexplored. This paper introduces a method to increase spatial cue salience through the augmentation of individual head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). Auditory model analyses indicate that augmented HRTFs may enhance the separability of musical instruments relative to individual HRTFs. Predicted benefits persist when moderate sensorineural hearing loss is modelled, though they are substantially reduced. Simulated hearing aid processing does not restore these benefits to normal-hearing levels.

In applications, it is often required to test objects or people to determine their qualities in terms of certain metrics. However, besides being naturally noisy, the test results can be corrupted by adversarial behaviors of objects or people being tested (test takers). For example, dishonest test takers can cheat in the exams to distort the test results. With the development of AI technologies, such distortions driven by cheating using AI technologies are becoming more commonplace and severe. In this paper, we propose optimal testing strategies which can still recover needed test results even if there are cheaters polluting the results. The proposed testing strategies will optimally re-test selected group of test takers using different testing security measures. We determine the optimal testing strategies using a dynamic programming method.

Power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) remains a widely studied technique for improving spectral efficiency and supporting dense connectivity in beyond-5G and 6G networks. Its main operating mechanisms, however, depend on the integrity of channel-state information (CSI). Power allocation, user ordering, pairing, clustering, and beamforming can all be distorted when the CSI consumed by the base station is deliberately biased rather than merely noisy. This article examines false CSI as an attack surface in power-domain NOMA. We organize the threat space using a compact taxonomy with two primary axes: magnitude, which distinguishes underreporting from overreporting, and ordering effect, which distinguishes order-preserving, boundary, and order-reversing attacks. We then show how coordinated false- CSI behavior, group-changing attacks, direction forgery, pilot spoofing, training-phase injection, and RIS-induced channel manipulation extend this basic taxonomy. Finally, we map each attack family to system-level impacts on power allocation, SIC reliability, scheduler behavior, fairness, throughput, and secrecy. The central message is that false CSI should be treated not only as a channel-estimation problem, but also as a control-input integrity problem for 6G NOMA.

An operator–theoretic formulation is developed for the synthesis of parameter-dependent controllers and observers for the Vlasov–Maxwell system. The linearized dynamics are modeled as a non-autonomous evolution system whose generators depend on measurable plasma quantities. Well-posedness of the associated evolution family is established together with uniform growth bounds. Parameter-dependent Lyapunov operators yield operator differential LMIs ensuring uniform exponential stability and observer convergence. An $H_\infty$ extension provides disturbance attenuation conditions consistent with the intrinsic energy structure of the coupled Vlasov–Maxwell equations. Galerkin projections lead to finite-dimensional LMIs consistent with the operator inequalities, enabling reliable numerical synthesis while preserving the analytical structure of the original model. Numerical results on a reduced Vlasov–Maxwell benchmark confirm the predicted convergence properties.

We have developed enhanced models for large-scale channel parameters intended for terrestrial-to-non-terrestrial (NTN) communication in Urban environments for supporting devices above ground levels, such as drones. The models are formulated as functions of terminal height above ground and elevation angle, applicable to S-Band and Ka-Band frequencies. To ensure realistic models, an open-source 3D scene generator was utilized to create a diverse set of urban scenes across Europe. Sionna ray-tracing was employed to generate path-gain samples for outdoor terminals, covering a range of heights up to 300 meters and elevation angles up to 90{\deg}. Our proposed analytical functions show excellent agreement to ray-tracing data for line-of-sight (LOS) probability, shadow-fading (SF), and clutter-loss (CL). Furthermore, a comparative coupling gain analysis with existing 3GPP models reveals notable differences, particularly caused by smaller CL and higher LOS probabilities from proposed models. Designed for ease of use, these models can be seamlessly integrated into simulation tools, offering a practical solution for researchers and engineers.

This paper proposes a scalable framework for voltage-stability dataset generation. Voltage-stability-constrained planning increasingly relies on machine-learning surrogates but training them requires large datasets labelled by continuation power flow (CPF) results, which is computationally costly. To address this, this paper proposes a framework that uses hierarchical clustering on boundary-proximity indicators to reduce the number of required CPF evaluations. The proposed approach combines (i) uniform sampling of feasible operating space using Hit-and-Run Markov Chain Monte Carlo, (ii) structured stress directions via maximin Latin hypercube sampling (LHS), (iii) sensitivity-guided perturbations to target weak buses, and (iv) clustering-based representative CPF labelling that reconstructs the voltage stability margins of unlabelled operating points from representative cluster medoids. Results on the IEEE 39-bus system show that the proposed framework significantly reduces CPF evaluations by 95.45% while preserving high accuracy and boundary fidelity for both regression and classification tasks. The reduced surrogates remain structurally consistent with their full-CPF dataset counterparts, demonstrating the suitability and scalability of the proposed approach for operation and planning optimization.

Voltage security assessment in power systems with high renewable energy source (RES) penetration requires analyzing many operating conditions to capture variability and uncertainty, but simulating a full year of operating points is computationally costly - motivating the selection of representative operating points (ROPs). Most existing methods cluster demand and generation profiles, but similarity in these profiles does not guarantee similarity in voltage behavior, since reactive power limits, voltage-control actions, and nonlinear network interactions shape voltage response in ways that cannot be inferred from power profile patterns. This paper proposes an unsupervised learning framework that selects ROPs based on the system's actual voltage response: each operating point is represented by system-wide voltage-risk indices from AC power-flow solutions, Principal Component Analysis reduces dimensionality, and Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering with Ward linkage identifies representative voltage regimes. A comprehensive set of evaluation criteria then measures how well the selected ROPs reproduce the full year's voltage-security characteristics under normal and contingency conditions. On the IEEE Voltage Test System under very high RES penetration, the framework reduces the annual operating point set by 99.66 percent while reproducing full-year voltage behavior with 98.3 percent reconstruction accuracy in steady state and 93.4 percent in post-contingency response, outperforming existing injection-space clustering and heuristic sampling.

Future low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations are expected to provide positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) as a native service alongside broadband, removing the GNSS dependency inherited by 5G non-terrestrial networks. This is known in the literature as fused PNT. This paper asks how a multibeam satellites in a LEO constellation should share their beams and power between a communication service (COM) and PNT in the scenario when communications keep full priority. Each beam on a satellite can provide a communication service, a PNT service or both (this under certain limitations). Then, the PNT service is evaluated by the share of area the reach $95\%$-of-time availability for a fixed maximum power available on each satellite. This paper present this PNT availability question as a beam-power budget, as the PNT beams do not need to transmit at the same power as the communication beams thanks to the processing gain on the receiver. Two satellite beam scheduler policies are compared: one where on a cell the beam serving COM demand is exclusive for COM, therefore the PNT service in this cell is provided by the other satellites in line of sight, it requires no signal modification and attains $70.5\%$ / $88.2\%$ availability under homogeneous/population-weighted traffic profiles; and a second policy, the COM beam can provide also PNT signals, this in-beam ranging embeds the ranging signal in the COM waveform, reaching the ceiling at the cost of waveform redesign. The availability gap between the two policies is concentrated on the thin-overlap equatorial belt.

This letter addresses the challenge of cyclic prefix (CP) problem in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based on-off keying (OOK) generation for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) systems. We propose a CP-aware waveform design that generates the OOK signal over the entire CP-OFDM symbol duration, potentially breaking subcarrier orthogonality after passing through the channel if the CP is not matched. To enable such a mechanism, OOK has to be generated independently and a modification to the existing OFDM-based OOK generation block is needed. Additionally, a block-wise time shift can be applied to minimize CP mismatch. Analytical discussions and simulations confirm that the resulting interference on legacy subcarriers remains controlled, while OOK detection performance significantly improves, albeit with trade-offs that should be carefully considered in practical deployments.

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband, represented by Starlink, is making high-resolution video streaming feasible beyond fixed terrestrial coverage. However, Starlink access links change across time and regions, exposing adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming to shifting throughput tails, latency, volatility, and handover conditions. Existing ABR controllers are usually designed, tuned, or trained for specific network conditions, making it difficult to handle newly exposed hard Starlink profiles. This paper proposes SafeLink-Agent, an agentic maintenance framework for ABR controllers over dynamic Starlink networks. SafeLink-Agent summarizes exposed failures and uses a large language model (LLM)-based agentic patch proposer to generate candidate patches, while replay verification determines whether each patch can be safely committed. The framework supports both rule-based controllers and learned controllers under the same maintenance workflow. Experiments on real Starlink networks show that SafeLink-Agent reduces the severe-session ratio of RobustMPC from 2.60% to 0.40% and reduces cumulative severe sessions from 45 to 7 in rolling maintenance. For learned controllers, verified adaptive auditing lowers the average severe-session ratio from 39.01% to 9.79%. These results demonstrate that agentic maintenance can improve ABR robustness under dynamic Starlink access conditions.

This paper investigates the distributed optimal consensus control problem of constrained heterogeneous multi-agent systems within a model predictive control (MPC) scheme. Both the control input sequence and the dynamically feasible consensus equilibrium are optimized simultaneously within the proposed MPC framework to improve consensus performance, yielding a coupled constrained optimization problem at each prediction time. A distributed primal–dual algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem, and locally verifiable conditions are derived to guarantee its convergence. Furthermore, sufficient terminal conditions are established for the proposed MPC framework to guarantee the recursive feasibility and asymptotic consensus of the closed-loop heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Finally, numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Distributed radar sensing exploits spatial diversity to resolve occlusions and improve estimation accuracy. Realizing these gains, however, relies on the transmission of high-dimensional radar data to a Fusion Center (FC). This imposes significant demands on the wireless network, especially in dense, dynamic, and interference-prone environments like factories, where resilience and latency are critical. This paper studies the resource allocation problem in a capacity-constrained two-hop cloud radar network. We propose a buffered access protocol where sensors perform local spectral windowing to reduce data rates before transmitting measurements to the FC via intermediate Edge Servers (ESs). The resource allocation is formulated as a mixed-integer optimization problem aimed at minimizing the aggregate Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) of the target parameters subject to fronthaul and backhaul capacity constraints. We develop an iterative solution algorithm based on Big-M formulation and Successive Convex Approximation (SCA). The proposed framework efficiently identifies the most informative sensor subsets and optimizes time-frequency resource assignments, ensuring high-fidelity sensing within stringent communication budgets.

Parameter estimation of periodic pulse trains is a critical task in numerous automated sensing and diagnostic applications. While estimation in the time domain provides superior accuracy in low signal-to-noise ratio environments, its high computational complexity frequently precludes its use in real-time systems. This paper investigates algorithmic optimizations to reduce runtime by leveraging recent advancements in computing architectures. Exploiting the inherent sparsity of the signal via sparse matrix multiplication kernels yields a substantial decrease in inference time. Furthermore, by separating the dense matrix projections into sequential cross-correlation and sparse summation steps, we fundamentally reduce both runtime and memory complexity. These optimizations drastically shrink the memory footprint, making time-domain estimation feasible for large datasets in real-time settings.

We present CheXtriev, a graph-based, anatomy-aware framework for chest radiograph retrieval. Unlike prior methods focussed on global features, our method leverages graph transformers to extract informative features from specific anatomical regions. Furthermore, it captures spatial context and the interplay between anatomical location and findings. This contextualization, grounded in evidence-based anatomy, results in a richer anatomy-aware representation and leads to more accurate, effective and efficient retrieval, particularly for less prevalent findings. CheXtriv outperforms state-of-the-art global and local approaches by 18% to 26% in retrieval accuracy and 11% to 23% in ranking quality. The code is available at https://github.com/cvit-mip/chextriev.