Papers

This paper develops a calibrated transient forecasting surrogate model for generator digital twin (DT) decision support that evaluates planned active- and reactive power load commands before they are applied. The proposed event-conditioned Hankel Dynamic Mode Decomposition with Control (Hankel-DMDc) model combines delay-coordinate lifting, command-event memory features, and an event-weighted Hankel basis so that sparse load-transition dynamics influence the reduced representation and fitted dynamics. This design targets intervals where voltage/frequency deviations and recovery behavior determine whether a candidate load command keeps the system within acceptable limits. To provide operator-facing confidence information, a split-conformal calibration layer is applied to the frozen surrogate model to form event-conditioned joint prediction bands for voltage and frequency. The experimental results show event-window root-mean-square errors of 1.058 V and 0.155 Hz. For a nominal 90% target, the bands attain 90.17% pointwise joint voltage-frequency coverage, with mean band widths of 3.55 V and 0.566 Hz. A 50-s open-loop rollout is computed in 181 ms on a single CPU core, approximately 280 times faster than real time, with forecast accuracy evaluated over horizons up to 5 s. These results demonstrate a computationally efficient advisory framework for generator DTs that combines transient prediction with calibrated uncertainty.

As the penetration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) increases in microgrids, they are increasingly expected to play a greater role in load frequency control (LFC). Model predictive control (MPC) is attractive for LFC because it incorporates system dynamics and operational constraints. However, most MPC-based LFC formulations rely on fixed reserve headroom based on forecasted renewable availability or storage systems. Under short-term renewable intermittency, IBR headroom is stochastic and time-varying, causing optimal control commands to exceed the physically deliverable regulation capability and cause stochastic saturation. This control-actuator mismatch degrades LFC performance. Accordingly, this study develops two headroom-aware strategies for PV-dominated microgrids. First, stochastic headroom constrained MPC (SHCMPC) incorporates headroom predictions through time-varying input constraints to enforce control feasibility. Second, stochastic adaptive MPC (SAMPC) embeds headroom awareness into the MPC objective function by adaptively penalizing control actions based on predicted headroom, reducing reliance on units with limited headroom without hard time-varying constraints. Simulation results show that stochastic saturation degrades conventional MPC-based LFC, particularly under tight reserve margins. Both strategies improve regulation performance. SHCMPC eliminates saturation events, while SAMPC achieves substantial saturation mitigation with lower computational effort, offering a computationally efficient alternative for real-time LFC under stochastic renewable availability.

Building automation systems generate rich sensor data yet remain insight-poor because heterogeneous point naming, missing metadata, and fragmented documentation obstruct their operational use. This systematic review analyses and codes 66 peer-reviewed studies on large language models (LLMs) for HVAC operations published between 2023 and March 2026. Each study is classified across five application families and three LLM method families and assessed for evidence realism, deployment readiness, and the responsibility boundary between the LLM and physical HVAC decisions. The corpus is concentrated in building energy modelling (BEM, 32 of 66 papers), while load forecasting remains too sparse for subfield-level conclusions. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, and none reports sustained operational deployment. No study was classified as ready-now for industry adoption; three were near-term and 63 research-only. Nevertheless, several bounded, human-in-the-loop uses merit near-term trials, including point-name normalisation, document-grounded operator support, BEM workflow assistance, and advisory interfaces around physics-based controllers. Conventional machine learning (ML), model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning (RL) and ontology-based tools remain more adopted for high-frequency control, short-horizon numerical forecasting, and well-posed ontology mapping, while autonomous agentic operation and unvalidated occupant proxies remain research-stage. Current evidence therefore supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous HVAC controllers. Future work should prioritise field-validated benchmarks, orchestration evaluation under operational constraints, and LLM-MPC/RL architectures with bounded latency and verifiable safety properties.

Data assimilation estimates the evolving state of a dynamical system by combining model forecasts with observations. While many conventional methods assume point-valued measurements, practical sensing systems may instead provide coarse information such as binary, ordinal, inequality, or interval-valued reports. Interval Data Assimilation (IDA) provides a principled framework for assimilating such information, but assumes that the observations to be assimilated are specified in advance. In many sensing settings, however, both where to query and what inequality to ask can be chosen, while only a limited number of queries can be issued. This raises a new observation-design problem: how should informative inequality queries be selected from the forecast uncertainty before their responses are known? We propose Active Query Design for Interval Data Assimilation (AQD-IDA), which uses the forecast ensemble to design binary threshold queries prior to the IDA update. AQD-IDA treats both the observation target and the threshold defining the inequality as design variables, thereby allowing the assimilation system to determine not only where to observe but also what question to ask. We develop query-selection criteria that account for forecast uncertainty, redundancy among queries, and anticipated reduction in posterior uncertainty. Experiments on Lorenz–96 and a spherical quasi-geostrophic model show that adaptive query design improves assimilation accuracy under a fixed binary-query budget, with joint observation-target–threshold selection outperforming fixed or separately designed queries. These results demonstrate that actively designing the information supplied to data assimilation can substantially increase the value of coarse observations.

Emotion recognition using physiological signals plays a crucial role in well-being analysis, affective computing and human-computer interaction. This study investigates the performance of multiple machine learning models in classifying targets such as discrete emotions with varying granularity, valence and arousal using physiological signals such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR). In here, we extracted various time- and frequency-domain features from the ECG and GSR data to train machine learning models. The results indicate that categorizing discrete emotions with fewer emotions and categorizing arousal achieves good classification accuracy with tree-based models. XGBoost achieved accuracy of 52.8 % for classifying discrete emotions and Random Forest achieved accuracy of 53.6% for classifying arousal. In both the cases, the combination of ECG+GSR feature sets achieved best performance. These findings highlight the effectiveness of physiological signals in capturing emotional states and support their use for emotion recognition systems.

We study latency-optimal file assignment in geo-distributed storage systems modeled as weighted graphs, where edge weights represent communication delays and each node stores one (possibly coded) file. Our goal is to minimize the average time required to retrieve an original file, taken uniformly over all nodes and files. We show that for every fixed number of files $k \geq 3$, computing a latency-minimizing assignment is NP-hard via a reduction from the domatic number problem. On the positive side, we identify natural network topologies that admit uncoded, structured optimal assignments in which, for every node, one can choose its $k$ closest nodes, including itself, so that they store distinct original files. We prove that every weighted tree, certain weighted cycles, and unit-weight graphs with sufficiently large minimum degree admit such assignments. For these graph classes, we provide efficient algorithms to construct latency-optimal file assignments.

Full-field laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV) can reveal how bolt torque loss redistributes a frequency response function (FRF) over an entire structure rather than only at a few sensor positions. This work presents a screening procedure for a four-bolt aluminum plate using pointwise amplitude and phase exports of scanned H1 FRFs. Candidate resonances were selected from the all-tight spatial RMS spectrum and tracked in four single-bolt 0 Nm cases. Seven baseline responses remained trackable within prescribed group-specific search windows and were retained as experimental resonance groups RG1-RG7; a dimensionless plate-frequency coefficient was reported alongside each measured frequency. Global changes were quantified using amplitude-only and complex, phase-retaining modal-assurance dissimilarities, and local changes were evaluated using matched-window FRAC-deficit maps and a normalized hotspot-area fraction. The retained groups separate into low-, intermediate-, and high-distortion responses, while the local maps distinguish compact joint-centered changes from distributed FRF redistribution. The workflow therefore links global FRF distortion with spatially resolved interpretation without relying on a trained classifier or specimen-specific node labels.

Robotic hands vary widely in anatomical fidelity and mechanical complexity, and these structural choices influence the coordination of joint motions and the difficulty of controlling the system. A unified framework is presented in which the kinematic and actuation stages are analysed separately and in composition, through the conditioning of the task Jacobian, the actuation matrix, and their product. It is applied to two hands representing opposing design philosophies, the Shadow Dexterous Hand and the Anatomically Correct, Biomechatronic Hand, along four morphological aspects: joint axis geometry, actuator-to-DOF ratio, coupling architecture, and authority distribution. All parameters are derived from the hands' canonical digital representations. Anatomical fidelity carries no uniform advantage: oblique axes improve thumb conditioning but leave the long fingers worse conditioned than the orthogonal-axis design, while the branching tendon network improves the effective control mapping at every long finger and worsens it significantly at the thumb, where actuator authority is concentrated on thumb opposition. Predictions derived from these metrics are evaluated against reinforcement learning experiments using PPO, DDPG+HER, and TQC+HER, across three different tasks.

Multi-modal learning has demonstrated strong potential in medical applications by integrating heterogeneous data sources such as medical imaging, clinical records, and genomics to improve predictive performance and support clinical decision-making. However, advances in this area are often constrained by two key challenges: the limited availability of well-curated, ready-to-use datasets that accurately reflect real-world conditions, where medical data are frequently collected inconsistently and are often incomplete; and the inherent difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data modalities. In this work, we introduce a newly curated multi-center, multi-modal, and longitudinal dataset designed to support the evaluation of a wide range of learning pipelines under realistic conditions. The dataset comprises a total of 1,365 lung cancer patients and has three imaging modalities (whole-slide images, CT scans, and PET scans), structured clinical data, transcriptomic, and longitudinal follow-up and treatment information. For each imaging modality the dataset contains more than one instance. Moreover, the dataset exhibits substantial and non-uniform missingness across modalities, making it well-suited for studying robust multi-modal fusion strategies. We further provide both uni-modal and multi-modal benchmarks on the task of 12-month overall survival prediction, disease-specific survival, as well as longitudinal benchmark of hazard prediction under severe missing data. Our results show that, despite high levels of missingness, integrating complementary modalities consistently improves predictive performance over uni-modal approaches, highlighting the value of multi-modal fusion in realistic clinical settings. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/ritacmendes/MMIST-LUNG.

We consider safety-critical control problems involving multiple requirements with different priorities and uncertainty in their evaluation. We represent these requirements using risk-aware rulebooks, where each requirement is assigned a risk measure and an acceptable threshold, and a priority relation is defined among the requirements. Each requirement induces a risk-evaluation function that maps a policy to the risk associated with its violation. We formulate risk-aware optimal control with rulebooks as a lexicographic optimization problem over excess risks and develop an anytime filtering and branch-and-bound algorithm that progressively tightens the certified optimality gap while characterizing the corresponding set of policies at each priority level. The algorithm returns a policy together with these gaps, which bound its suboptimality. We prove that these gaps are valid for any finite computational budget and, under additional assumptions, converge to zero as the computational budget increases. We evaluate the algorithm on a synthetic benchmark with a known optimum and a realistic highway-merging simulation with CVaR-based collision, rear-braking, headway, and comfort rules.

Flexible loads can enhance power system stability by providing reserves, but their limited energy capacity and uncertain availability distinguish them from conventional generators. To accommodate these characteristics, the Danish Transmission System Operator (TSO) recently introduced new reserve market rules that incorporate energy constraints and relax reliability requirements. In this context, the optimal reserve quantification becomes a joint chance-constrained reserve quantification problem, which is difficult to solve. In this paper, we derive two analytical reformulations of this problem: an exact one when a reserve direction dominates and an approximate one, otherwise. Furthermore, when flexible loads must collectively satisfy a reliability requirement, we introduce the concept of an optimal portfolio of flexible loads: adding loads with similar expected values but different stochastic behaviors to an existing portfolio may change the total portfolio's reserves. To support this idea, we theoretically study the marginal increase in reserves resulting from adding a load. Numerical results show that our analytical reformulations closely match the exact formulation, with a mean absolute error of 2.5%. Case studies further demonstrate the existence of optimal load groupings and our ability to predict the portfolio in which a load's marginal value is highest, leveraging our theoretical analysis.

Performance Boosting (PB) is a control framework that, for a pre-stabilized system subject to $\mathcal L_p$ process disturbances, parametrizes the controllers that preserve closed-loop $\mathcal L_p$-stability through a causal $\mathcal L_p$-stable operator mapping reconstructed disturbances to corrective control actions. Although this permits optimization over expressive stability-preserving controllers, learning a desired policy from disturbance information alone can be difficult. We introduce a structured factorization for context-enriched, multi-input PB operators. The proposed architecture combines an $\mathcal L_p$-stable dynamical module that processes reconstructed disturbances with a uniformly bounded matrix-valued mixer depending on disturbances and contextual signals. Under the standard PB assumptions, this factorization preserves closed-loop $\mathcal L_p$-stability by construction. Moreover, on a weighted-envelope disturbance domain, we prove that the factorization is necessary and sufficient for causal operators satisfying a context-uniform envelope-preservation property. A numerical moving-gate navigation experiment demonstrates the advantages of the proposed architecture over context-agnostic PB, MAD, and reference-aware PB baselines.

This paper develops a marginal pricing mechanism for adaptive robust look-ahead economic dispatch (LAED) under net-load uncertainty. In current market practice, deterministic multi-interval dispatch can misprice flexibility when forecast error is large. Fully adaptive robust (FAR) dispatch captures this uncertainty, but competing worst-case trajectories can imply different marginal values of demand, leaving no single price for market settlement. We propose causal affine recourse (CAR) as a tractable, price-forming approximation. CAR replaces independently optimized trajectory-specific schedules with a causal affine response policy, yielding a market-clearing model that retains the standard energy and congestion decomposition of DC Locational Marginal Pricing. We then demonstrate that CAR-LMP together with a ramp-adjusted current settlement supports dispatch-following and eliminates current-period lost opportunity costs. We solve the CAR problem by deriving a robust counterpart and present computational evidence on exact small DC instances, a ten-generator system, and an IEEE 300-bus public-network case. These simulations show that the proposed prices collapse exactly to deterministic LAED-LMP when robustness is inactive, remain stable in loose-ramp regimes, and produce economically meaningful price shifts when flexibility is scarce. The proposed pricing mechanism provides a practical bridge between adaptive robust dispatch and market-based pricing.

Background and Objective: External evaluation of medical-imaging AI is often collapsed into discrimination. We evaluated a computational protocol that separately tests discrimination, probability calibration, fixed operatingpoint transport, shortcut-associated signal, and limited-label recoverability for pediatric pneumonia classification across datasets from three countries. Methods: After exact-duplicate removal, 5,824 Guangzhou radiographs supported leakage-controlled source development and internal testing. A frozen three-seed DenseNet121 dual-view ensemble was evaluated zero-shot on BDCXR-3257 from Bangladesh (n = 3, 257) and an untouched harmonized VinDr-PCXR/PediCXR test cohort from Vietnam (n = 1, 077). Matched seed-42 variants tested architectural robustness. Secondary BDCXR analyses used a fixed 651-image adaptation pool and 2,606-image hold-out; 163, 326, and 651 labels represented 5%, 10%, and 20% of complete BDCXR. Results: Internal AUROC was 0.976 with 95.1% sensitivity. BDCXR and VinDr-PCXR AUROC were 0.798 and 0.742, while frozen-threshold sensitivity fell to 6.2% and 0%. Source-to-BDCXR AUROC degradation occurred for a full-image baseline (0.961 to 0.749), ungated dual-view model (0.977 to 0.766), and gated MixStyle model (0.966 to 0.789). With 163 BDCXR labels, Platt recalibration preserved AUROC while increasing held-out sensitivity to 88.3%, but specificity was 47.9% and the alert rate was 78.5%. Two hundred repeated 163-label fits confirmed sensitivity recovery but substantial specificity variability. Conclusions: Cross-dataset shifts across countries affected ranking, probability alignment, and source-defined decision behavior differently. Transport studies should evaluate these components separately and quantify the operational burden of apparent recovery.

The increasing penetration of renewable energy challenges frequency stability due to high variability and declining inertia. Traditional frequency security constrained dispatch methods fail to capture regional frequency heterogeneity and spatially correlated stochastic disturbances, resulting in inaccurate frequency security enforcement. To address this, a regional frequency constrained dispatch method is proposed, considering the spatially joint stochastic disturbances and contingencies. Firstly, a multi-regional frequency response model is constructed, incorporating the Vine-Copula based characterization of regional stochastic disturbances and regional frequency support. Then, a progressive latent-bottleneck physics-informed neural network is applied to characterize differential frequency nadir terms and regional frequency support integral terms via an encoder-decoder architecture, which enables optimization compatible expressions of system frequency dynamics. Finally, a day ahead dispatch model is developed in which regional stochastic frequency constraints are embedded using a CVaR-based formulation. A case study on the IEEE 118-bus system shows that the proposed method outperforms the unified center of inertia embedded approach in mitigating regional frequency violations, with the regional frequency nadir and RoCoF improved by 32.76% and 2.06%, respectively.

At low bitrates, neural speech codecs have limited capacity to encode all information needed for high-quality re construction, especially when relying solely on speech-derived representations. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a Semantic- and Visual-enhanced Speech Codec (SVSC), which in corporates semantic and visual cues into the neural speech coding process. Specifically, built upon a mainstream neural speech cod ing architecture, SVSC introduces a semantic encoding-decoding branch and an image analysis-synthesis branch. It fuses deep semantic features with visual cues through a cross-attention mech anism, forming an auxiliary high-level representation enriched with contextual and articulatory information. To handle different inference scenarios, SVSC introduces two information-injection strategies based on the availability of auxiliary semantic and vi sual cues. When such cues are available, the fusion mode directly incorporates the auxiliary representations into the speech coding branch through feature concatenation; otherwise, the distillation mode transfers auxiliary information into the speech coding branch through knowledge distillation during training, enabling speech-only inference without additional inputs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of incorporating semantic and visual cues, improving the ViSQOL score of reconstructed speech from 3.86 to 4.01.

Conformal counterfactual inference enables network operators to use logged telemetry to reliably answer 'what-if' questions about network operation. These answers typically take the form of prediction sets that contain, with a user-defined probability, the key performance indicators (KPIs) that would have been observed under alternative control actions. A key challenge is that logged telemetry may omit variables used by the controller, resulting in hidden confounding and invalidating the statistical guarantees of counterfactual analysis. In principle, this issue can be addressed using randomized telemetry, collected by assigning control actions independently of the network state. However, because such randomization may disrupt normal operation, randomized telemetry is typically scarce, causing counterfactual analysis based solely on it to produce uninformative prediction sets. To address these challenges, we propose Confounding-Valid Counterfactual Conformal Inference (CV-CCI), which combines abundant, potentially confounded observational telemetry with limited randomized data through the General Synthetic-Powered Inference (GESPI) principle. CV-CCI leverages observational data to improve efficiency while using randomized data to retain finite-sample coverage guarantees under arbitrary hidden confounding. Experiments on two representative radio access network (RAN) control tasks show that CV-CCI remains valid under hidden confounding while producing more efficient prediction sets than state-of-the-art confounding-valid baselines.

Neuromorphic engineering develops hardware and software systems inspired by biological neurons, with the goal of achieving energy-efficient, low-latency, robust, and adaptive computation, communication and control. Its potential impact on systems and control is significant, as it may enable novel approaches to control and estimation by leveraging brain-inspired computation and communication principles. In this context, we present a framework for the robust stabilization of a plant subject to disturbances when the communication between noisy sensors and the controller relies on spiking signals generated by neuron-inspired schemes. The communication scheme consists of a spike encoder on the sensors side, which is based on integrate-and-fire neurons that convert the analog plant output measurement into a spiking signal, and a spike decoder on the controller side inspired by synaptic processing to convert the received spiking signal into an analog signal. We provide design conditions on the spike decoder, the spike encoder as well as on the controller under which the closed-loop system exhibits a practical input-to-state stability property, where the adjustable parameters are the amplitudes of the spikes. The results are shown to be applicable to a class of nonlinear systems as well as to any stabilizable and detectable linear time-invariant system. Numerical simulations on a single-link manipulator illustrate the potential of the approach.

Civil turbofan engines lose compressor efficiency every time they fly through particle-laden air. Fouling of the high-pressure compressor (HPC) is the dominant recoverable performance-loss mechanism. Existing studies treat environmental particle exposure, blade-row deposition and stage-performance deterioration as separate problems, which limits understanding of the issue. Stage-stacking approaches require deterioration levels to be prescribed rather than derived from the operating environment, leaving the causal chain from route conditions to engine performance unresolved. This paper presents a forward simulation framework that closes this gap by propagating route-, season-, and altitude-dependent particle exposure through four successive layers: (1) flight-phase-resolved HPC inlet dose calculation; (2) stage-wise deposition across the HPC; (3) deposition-to-deterioration mapping; and (4) stage thermodynamic stacking, yielding overall fouled HPC isentropic efficiency. Demonstrated on a representative civil high-bypass turbofan baseline with characteristics similar to the CFM56-7B, the predicted deterioration milestones are confirmed in magnitude and timescale against publicly available in-service support datasets. The results reproduce front-stage-dominated deposition, rapid early deterioration with asymptotic saturation, and clear route- and season-dependent fouling behaviour. To our knowledge, this is the first model that closes the complete chain from operationally resolved environmental exposure to the overall loss of HPC isentropic efficiency in a single physically traceable forward framework.

Movable and fluid antenna systems turn antenna position into a design variable. At sub-wavelength spacings, however, their behavior is governed by mutual coupling, modeled today by two disjoint traditions: circuit-theoretic impedance matrices with element-level constants, and field-theoretic kernels with norm-type power constraints. This paper unifies the two. Starting from the impedance kernel of a holographic surface, a Poynting-anchored balance identifies its resistive part with ohmic plus radiated power and its reactive part with stored-energy imbalance, and a circuit-field equivalence shows that the multiport impedance matrix is the kernel sampled at the port separations, in a single closed spherical-Hankel form. In the wavenumber domain the resistive kernel asymptotically diagonalizes in the aperture size: visible modes radiate at closed-form prices, evanescent modes only dissipate, and a flexible port becomes a constant-modulus codeword whose coupling is the pullback of the spectral weight. Coupling-aware multi-user sum-rate maximization over precoders and port positions is then formulated under physical power and voltage constraints and solved by weighted-MMSE and projected-gradient steps with closed-form gradients. A modal relaxation upper-bounds every port configuration and seeds the search by FFT-based codeword projection. A half-wavelength corollary and a superdirectivity margin quantify when coupling hurts, and when it helps.

Communication bottlenecks remain a primary obstacle to the large-scale deployment of federated learning (FL). This article proposes a comprehensive framework for building communication-efficient FL, founded on three fundamental pillars: model compression, client selection, and resource allocation. We first survey state-of-the-art techniques for each pillar, specifically elucidating how quantization, pruning, and low-rank approximation reduce payloads; how intelligent client schedulers exploit heterogeneity; and how emerging communication paradigms such as Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) and Over-the-Air Computation (AirComp) redefine bandwidth and energy utilization. Subsequently, these insights are unified through a task-oriented design philosophy that couples strategy selection with cross-layer, multi-objective optimization. To validate the proposed framework, we present an autonomous driving case study with two complementary experiments: a task-oriented client scheduling strategy that improves object detection accuracy under the same communication time budget, and a joint quantization-bandwidth optimization that further reduces total training time under dynamic networks. Together, the experiments demonstrate the advantages of holistic task-oriented design for real-world FL deployment.

Recent benchmarks such as PowerGraph provide large collections of power-grid graphs for cascading-failure classification. Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong predictive performance on this task, but typically require end-to-end training and model-specific tuning, while their latent representations can be difficult to relate to physically meaningful propagation patterns. Random Walk Fingerprints (RWF) offer a scalable and interpretable alternative, but existing variants primarily emphasise topology and node-level information, leaving grid-relevant operational edge states in the walk dynamics. We propose Multi-Channel Physics-Aware Random Walk Fingerprints (MC-PA-RWF) for power systems, a lightweight graph-level representation framework that introduces physical edge states into random-walk propagation. The method constructs multiple edge-weighted channels from domain-relevant attributes, extracts a channel-specific fingerprint from each weighted graph, and concatenates the resulting vectors into a compact representation. Experiments on three PowerGraph benchmark systems show substantial improvements over topology-only RWF and competitive balanced accuracy against strong GNN baselines, including Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), Graph Attention Networks (GAT), Graph Isomorphism Networks with edge features (GINE), and Transformer-based Graph Convolutional Networks (TransformerConv). At the largest evaluated settings, the node-edge extension MC-PA-RWF+ achieves around 98.04% - 99.32% balanced accuracy and improves failure-class F1 over the strongest GNN baseline by 1.60 – 5.84 percentage points, with statistically significant gains across all three systems.

In this letter, we study finite-horizon linear-quadratic Stackelberg difference games with coupled-affine state-control inequality constraints. Under the stated assumptions, we show that generalized open-loop Stackelberg equilibria admit an exact reformulation as an optimal control problem subject to a discrete-time linear complementarity system. Eliminating the dynamic variables yields a large-scale linear complementarity quadratic program, together with an explicit recovery map for the follower strategy. This reformulation enables the numerical computation of these equilibria. We illustrate the proposed approach using a constrained network-flow game.

Dynamic environments pose fundamental challenges to integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), particularly due to severe Doppler effects, rapidly time-varying channels, and the intricate coupling between delay and Doppler shifts. Affine frequency-division multiplexing (AFDM), with its inherent capability of characterizing and separating delay and Doppler effects, has emerged as a promising waveform for dynamic ISAC. This article provides a comprehensive overview on AFDM-enabled ISAC in dynamic environments, covering its fundamental principles, distinctive advantages, representative application scenarios, and key enabling technologies. We first characterize the key features of ISAC in dynamic environments and introduce the fundamentals of AFDM, followed by an analysis of scenarios where AFDM can provide significant performance benefits. Then, several key enabling technologies for AFDM-based ISAC in dynamic environments are elaborated upon, accompanied by case studies on the critical aspects therein. Finally, open challenges and promising future research directions are discussed, aiming to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners while inspiring further innovation in this emerging field.

Radars improve the sensing robustness of UAVs by operating under poor lighting and weather conditions and seeing through occlusions such as vegetation. However, they suffer from poor angular resolution, which can be addressed using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) algorithms. State-of-the-art UAV SAR methods operate at a depression angle and are not suitable for sensor fusion applications where the data are collected from areas directly below the UAV (i.e., the UAV nadir). In this paper, we present an interferometric SAR (InSAR) framework for reconstructing 3D images from the UAV nadir using a low-cost multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) mm-wave radar. Additionally, an effective method based on the phase gradient autofocus (PGA) is presented for compensating the phase error across the virtual receive antennas. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our 3D imaging algorithm in both simulation and experimental scenarios.

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) enables near-field location-specific beam focusing for sixth-generation (6G) communications. Uniform circular arrays (UCAs), with rotational symmetry and uniform azimuth coverage, have emerged as a key enabling architecture for near-field XL-MIMO systems. In this paper, we propose a resolution-aware hierarchical codebook for near-field UCA systems, along with an efficient two-stage beam training scheme to significantly reduce the training overhead. Specifically, we characterize the minimum resolvable distance of UCA systems in the near-field region based on a geometric spherical-wave propagation model, revealing their spatial resolution capability in the joint angle–distance domain. Guided by this result, we design a UCA-specific hierarchical codebook, where a power-efficient distance-robust beamforming (DRBF) codebook provides coarse azimuth localization and a full-precision (FP) codebook sampled according to the minimum resolvable distance enables refined angle–distance beam search. The regularized modal compensation suppresses weak-mode amplification and provides a controllable tradeoff between absolute amplitude gain under unit-norm transmission and distance robustness. Based on this codebook, we develop a hierarchical decoupled-architecture Bayesian regression (HDA-BAR) scheme for fast and accurate near-field beam training. For the considered array configuration, the resulting HDA-BAR training procedure requires $384$ probing slots, corresponding to an approximately \(99.66\%\) overhead reduction relative to the conventional near-field exhaustive-search benchmark.

In this work, we study policy optimization under domain randomization for linear quadratic control, focusing on learning a single state-feedback controller that minimizes the average cost across systems with uncertain dynamics. We propose a policy iteration algorithm with a step-size rule that preserves stability across all sampled systems at each iteration. We show that the method yields monotonic improvement of the sample-average objective and that a stabilizing step size always exists. Under standard smoothness assumptions, the iterates converge subsequentially to stationary points, and under a gradient-dominance condition, we obtain a global linear convergence rate.

Approximate computing improves energy efficiency in error-resilient applications, but square root units remain challenging due to the trade-off between hardware cost and computational accuracy. This paper presents an energy-efficient, error-optimized, piecewise-linear approximation-based unsigned square rooter (EOSQR) for 2n-bit inputs that achieves high accuracy with low hardware complexity, using only simple arithmetic and shift operations. The EOSQR design is implemented in Verilog-HDL and evaluated on a 16-bit benchmark synthesized on an Artix-7 FPGA. Compared to representative state-of-the-art approximate square rooters, EOSQR achieves the lowest error among accuracy-critical designs while delivering 61.91 percent resource savings, 77.54 percent power savings, and 53.11 percent latency reduction relative to a precise restoring array-based square rooter. To enable holistic evaluation, a Composite Efficiency Metric (CEM) is introduced to jointly capture accuracy and energy efficiency. EOSQR is further validated across representative image-processing workloads, including Sobel edge detection, K-means colour quantization, and K-nearest-neighbour (KNN) classification. Experimental results demonstrate that EOSQR achieves high computational accuracy with a superior CEM-based accuracy-hardware efficiency trade-off while maintaining visual quality and classification performance, making it well-suited for real-time edge-embedded systems.

We study the time derivative of the matrix exponential $B(t)=\mathrm{exp}(A(t))$, where $A(t)$ is a time-parametrized curve in $\mathrm{Mat}(n)$. Starting from the Taylor series expansion, we derive a nested summation formula, which is then reformulated into a double summation. This expression is converted into an integral representation using Euler's beta function, and further expressed in terms of Lie brackets and the adjoint representation. Later, we extend this to a family of problems and verify a well-known result. Finally, we establish connections to the Gateaux and Fréchet derivatives, proving the latter's existence. These results offer a unified and explicit framework for understanding the derivative of the exponential map.

Exemplar methods separate a mixture by picking one learned spectrum per source and deforming it until it explains the observation, making one deformation class both reconstructor and selector. We show that the second role is empty as soon as the class can interpolate: the rule then ranks candidates on its regulariser, a choice made before the data, and the estimates sum back to the mixture whichever candidate wins. The condition is a parameter count, so the diagnosis runs before any experiment. On free per-bin deformation of complex spectra it explains the observed pathologies at once: a criterion that ranks candidates by their loudness, and half an output that is a mask on the mixture rather than an exemplar. The same theorem prescribes the repair, a selection class poorer than the reconstruction class: one complex gain and one pure delay rank the candidates, and a local combination of the best-aligned atoms, fitted jointly in closed form, rebuilds them. On MUSDB18 against the exact ceiling of the masking class, the distance between the criterion and an oracle inside its own candidate pool falls under the rigid selector from 6.2-7.7 to 0.5-2.8 dB, though only 0.9-1.2 dB of that reaches the output, and the per-frame latency of the deployed rule by a factor of 47 to 806. One lock remains, quantified: atoms are scored against the mixture, so the score carries a term for the other source that absorbs the capacity the reconstruction class gains, leaving the output 10.0 dB under the ceiling. Ranking hypotheses by the residual of a fit free enough to interpolate ranks them on the regulariser alone.