Papers

Semantic and goal-oriented communication is increasingly studied for 6G, but generalization beyond seen data remains a key weakness under tight rate budgets. Many existing systems overfit their training data and degrade sharply at very low bit rates because they attempt to compress the entire signal. We introduce Foundation Model-Guided Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication (FMSGOC), a framework that uses broad visual-linguistic Foundation Model priors to mitigate overfitting. It further improves rate efficiency by concentrating bits on sparse, goal-aligned anchors and relying on generative foundation-model priors to reconstruct the masked regions. By decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct, a vision-language foundation model selects and transmits a sparse set of semantic anchors, while a pretrained diffusion model, fine-tuned for masked completion, reconstructs the image at the receiver. In our experiments, FMSGOC reaches 0.039 bits per pixel (BPP), maintains high semantic fidelity (cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 on CIFAR-10), remains robust on previously unseen inputs (0.83-0.86 on ImageNet), and shows good perceptual similarity (0.1278/0.1558, CIFAR-10/ImageNet), outperforming strong end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

Machine learning has shown its largest gains in the band below 10 ms inside a 3GPP new radio (NR) 5G distributed unit (DU): link adaptation, per-slot scheduling, channel estimation, and the receiver itself. No open platform has let independently built software run there. Prior dApp frameworks reached the band only as external observers of an export stream. This paper is a guided introduction to the OCUDU dApp platform, an open runtime and E3 interface under which signed AI-RAN applications execute inside a production DU under three timing contracts: resident on the GPU receive chain (Class A), inside the scheduler's 100 us admitted deadline (Class B), or as never-blocking observers whose results the scheduler consumes (Class C). The conventional path is never displaced, and every authority is typed, validated, and operator-bounded. The paper explains how the runtime, the embedded E3 agent, and the three public repositories fit together; shows a dApp's source, its signed package, and its lifecycle state machine; defines the contracts a module is written against; and shows how one management surface serves a Python script, an operator's console, and an LLM agent. On a GB10 gNB with attached handsets, dApps of all three classes, including an out-of-tree neural equalizer, ran together on a live cell without a single fallback, and equalizer variants were compared over the air by lifecycle operations alone. Every measured checkpoint is reported with its conditions and its gaps. Platform, SDK, and a zero-hardware quickstart are public under BSD-3-Clause-Clear as a preview release of the OCUDU AI-RAN Working Group 2, inviting feedback, new use cases, and independent vetting ahead of upstreaming into the OCUDU mainline.

This paper develops a convex tube model predictive control formulation for constrained nonlinear systems. We consider dynamics described by a discrete-time state-space model with parametric and additive uncertainty that admits a difference-of-convex decomposition. Convex directional bounds of the nonlinear dynamics are combined with configuration-constrained polytopic tubes, whose predefined combinatorial structure yields an affine parameterization of their vertices. The resulting finite-dimensional sufficient conditions certify robust one-step tube propagation under parametric uncertainty and additive disturbances, while allowing the tube geometry and an associated vertex control law to be optimized jointly in a single convex program. An implicit terminal condition guarantees recursive feasibility and convergence of the predicted tube to a target robust control invariant set. Numerical results illustrate the closed-loop properties and the trade-off between geometric flexibility and computational complexity.

Distributed applications (dApps) bring AI to the microsecond-to-millisecond band beside the 5G distributed unit (DU), but every public dApp framework realizes them the same way: an external process that receives an indication and returns a control message. That boundary is right for sensing and advisory workloads. It cannot express a neural receiver that must finish inside a slot, and it cannot hold a scheduling decision the MAC is waiting on. This paper asks what a dApp interface must deliver, in latency and bandwidth, for the AI-RAN use cases now filed under that name to be realized as dApps at all. It treats the coupling between a dApp and the DU as a design axis with two legitimate ends, a C ABI inside the DU process and a protocol-standard E3AP association over SCTP, and places the three OCUDU dApp classes on it. An audited corpus of 39 runtime AI-RAN use cases, sized by 5G NR timing, shows that more than half cannot cross the observer boundary: inline PHY work because an indication has no return path into the same slot, and bounded control because of the tail under load. Measuring the mechanisms each framework actually uses, on a quiet host and with a live cell on the air, shows that every carrier meets a 100 us control deadline on an idle host and that only the in-process paths still do once the DU is running. The asynchronous use cases remain feasible at every position, so the protocol-standard end is kept as a first-class option; what in-process placement adds for them is accountable staleness and an observation-to-decision path with no message on it. These measurements derive the released ABI, a stream for inline work, a validated call for bounded control, and a choice of lease, supervised ring, or portable E3 client for observation, and four dApps of all three classes are validated together on one over-the-air cell.

Grid-connected solar distributed energy resources (DERs), such as solar inverters and monitoring platforms, have been deployed at unprecedented scale over the past few years, with global solar capacity more than doubling since 2022. To support monitoring and control, many of these systems are Internet-connected and configured by installers or end users, yet the real-world scale of their Internet exposure and the implications for power grid operation remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present an Internet-scale evaluation of exposed and vulnerable solar DER infrastructure, and assess the risk that compromised DERs can pose to energy grids. We develop a method for accurately identifying solar DERs from Internet scanning data, and discover a diverse population of over 66,000 Internet-exposed solar DERs. We detect that at least 10,000 of these DERs may have known CVEs, such as unauthenticated monitoring and control endpoints. To assess the risk that these vulnerable DERs pose to a power grid, we use an electric grid network for Oahu, Hawaii, established and used by the power system research community, and conduct a power system analysis. Our evaluation shows that by compromising exposed DERs, attackers can cause voltage and line flow violations across multiple locations in the Oahu network, resulting in a range of consequences from degraded power quality to damaged power system components to power outages. Ultimately, our work brings to light the emerging threat of grid-connected DERs, and provides directions for improving energy security.

Droop-free distributed control has emerged as a promising alternative to conventional linear droop control for coordinating inverter-based resources in AC microgrids. However, existing droop-free methods typically rely on quasi-steady state network models that neglect fast electromagnetic transients and assume a decoupled dependence of active and reactive power on frequency and voltage, respectively. In this paper, we propose a transient-aware droop-free distributed primary/secondary control framework for grid-forming (GFM) inverters. The control objective is to achieve proportional active and reactive power sharing, frequency regulation, and voltage regulation within prescribed bounds. The proposed approach incorporates dynamic models of network lines and loads into the control design, enabling accurate representation of transient behavior while capturing the coupled nature of power flow interactions. A gradient-based distributed control update is derived from an optimization formulation, in which voltage magnitude constraints are enforced through a projection operator. To validate the performance of the proposed control, real-time simulation studies are conducted on a four-inverter microgrid under load changes in both strong and weak grid conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed method improves transient performance, particularly in weak grids, while preserving the same steady state operating conditions as existing QSS-based droop-free approaches.

Recurrent detectors such as bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) networks are low-complexity alternatives to the optimal Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) detector for faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling. Motivated by convolutional detectors that build the intersymbol interference (ISI) structure into their architecture, we ask whether processing nested ISI windows in separate recurrent branches improves the bit error rate (BER) of a Bi-LSTM. Across roughly 260 controlled trainings it does not: at a matched parameter budget and a matched readout, the multi-window architecture never significantly beats a plain Bi-LSTM. Nested windowing is an invertible rearrangement that adds no information, extra branches only add bottlenecks, and a distillation diagnostic shows the network is already near optimal for its window. The limitation is therefore the observation model, not the architecture. Keeping the architecture fixed, we pre-whiten the input, restoring the conditional independence that colored matched-filter noise violates, and distill the BCJR soft posterior into the network. With 3.4% more parameters this reaches 1.05 times the BCJR BER at a compression factor of 0.8 and 1.89 times at 0.7, improving to 1.47 times when the whitened window is widened. The 23.7% BER reduction at 0.8 requires an ill-conditioned ISI matrix but is not monotone in the conditioning, and it holds across five independent noise realizations and a symbol-level McNemar test.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an important modality in a wide range of imaging applications due to its versatile, long range and near all weather operating capabilities. However, Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) remains a challenging problem due to limited labelled data, the strong speckle in SAR images and the significant domain gap between SAR and more abundant optical imagery. In contrast, electro-optical (EO) imagery benefits from massive datasets, clearer visual structure and powerful foundation models. In this work, we investigate how vision foundation models trained on optical data can provide class level supervision for SAR classification. We propose a cross-modal EO to SAR prototype alignment framework in which a frozen EO encoder, based on a DINOv3 vision foundation model, is used to construct class level optical prototypes without requiring strict EO/SAR pairs. A SAR model is then trained to classify SAR images while aligning its embeddings to the corresponding EO class prototype. At inference time, the SAR model operates independently, without access to optical imagery. We evaluate our approach on the UNICORNv2 dataset, an EO and SAR dataset of civilian vehicles with heavily speckled images and severe class imbalance. EO prototype alignment improves SAR classification accuracy over frozen DINOv3, SAR only finetuning and unpaired distribution alignment baselines, and t-SNE visualizations provide qualitative evidence of clearer separation among classes in the trained SAR embedding space. These results suggest that optical vision foundation models, despite being trained on visible spectrum imagery, provide transferable information for SAR image classification, offering a practical method for using large scale pretrained vision foundation models across challenging sensing modalities.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) models are frequently trained and validated on synthetic or channel-cabled data, leaving open the question of how they behave once path loss and antenna pointing error are introduced by a genuine free-space link. We report a curriculum fine-tuning study of a hybrid CNN-Transformer AMC model. The general-purpose, all-32-class dataset underlying the model was built entirely at 915 MHz, on a controlled, clock/PPS-synchronized MIMO-expansion-cable link (not spatial-multiplexing transmission); all subsequent free-space, real-hardware experimentation - the sequential fine-tuning curriculum, matched-distance evaluation, and every reported over-the-air accuracy figure - was carried out at 4 GHz, across five directional-antenna distances (25, 35, 50, 70, 75 cm) under fixed TX/RX gain. Three distances used near-ideal antenna alignment (~99%) and two used a deliberately introduced partial misalignment (~85%), fine-tuned last in the curriculum. We report matched-distance test accuracy (91.8-93.7% across all five 4 GHz conditions) and confusion-matrix analysis grounded in RF theory, and report honestly where our sequential fine-tuning order confounds cumulative link adaptation with antenna alignment, rather than overstating what the data can support.

Most automated brain parcellation tools are developed and validated on T1-weighted (T1w) MRI. Yet, some clinical workflows for which parcellation is relevant only use contrast-enhanced T1w (T1ce) MRI, on which T1w-trained models are less accurate. We present a unified network that parcellates both pre- and post-contrast agent T1w MRI reliably, trained on a combination of the two with conditioning that spatially modulates its response differently for each. Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) is a known approach for input-based modulation in networks. It applies a per-channel scale and shift uniformly across the input. However, the appearance change between pre- and post-contrast varies locally across the brain, making FiLM suboptimal for our use case. In this work, we introduce Spatial FiLM (SpFiLM), a conditioning layer whose modulation varies spatially, assembling a voxel-wise scale and shift from image-derived spatial patterns. Using a cohort of 134 patients with paired T1w and T1ce MRI parcellated into 106 classes, the addition of SpFiLM layers in a UNet increased the mean Dice on the test set of 25 patients from 80.2% to 84.1%, a 4.9% relative improvement. Adding SpFiLM layers led to the best performance on both pre- and post-contrast MRI, even when controlling for network parameter counts.

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, uniform arrays are typically configured with inter-element spacing no greater than half a wavelength to avoid grating lobes and spatial aliasing. However, many emerging fifth- and sixth-generation (5G/6G) applications rely on distributed arrays whose inter-element spacing far exceeds half a wavelength. In this paper, we propose an electromagnetic mutual-information-theoretic (EMIT)-guided non-uniform array (NUA) design with large inter-element spacing for massive MIMO systems to address the grating lobes and spatial aliasing artifacts, and in the meantime, to reduce the hardware cost and energy consumption. We start by developing a multipath channel model for non-uniform planar arrays, and analyze the resulting channel characteristics in terms of inter-user interference, aperture efficiency, favorable propagation and channel capacity for the proposed typical NUA patterns. The model is further extended to wideband scenarios, where NUAs demonstrate improved robustness against beam squint due to their more compact element distribution. In addition, we introduce an EMIT approach to NUA design, which links the spatial sampling pattern of an antenna array to the capacity of the resulting MIMO channel. This gives rise to two complementary shaping strategies, amplitude tapering and geometric shaping, and their joint optimization. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed NUAs significantly outperform conventional uniform arrays in aperture efficiency, channel orthogonality, beam squint mitigation, capacity, and error rate performance.

We study online control of a scalar storage system with nonnegative adversarial resource arrivals and state-dependent action constraints. The adversarial, time-varying cost depends on both state and action. At each time, the controller selects a feasible action before the current resource arrival and cost are revealed. To handle the coupling between feasibility and online learning, we introduce Simplex Disturbance-Action Control (SDAC), whose policies have $H$ nonnegative parameters summing to at most one. Every fixed SDAC policy is feasible by construction. Our online SDAC controller updates these parameters using entropic online mirror descent while preserving feasibility along the time-varying trajectory. We prove a regret bound of $O\!\left(\sqrt{T\log(H+1)}\right)$ relative to the best fixed SDAC policy and a minimax lower bound showing that the dependence on $T$ is tight. We also introduce infinite-memory SDAC policies, which include every feasible fixed-fraction policy. SDAC policies approximate this class with an error that decreases geometrically with $H$. For a suitable choice $H=\Theta(\log T)$, the resulting regret against infinite-memory SDAC policies is $O\!\left(\sqrt{T\log\log T}\right)$. The framework applies to energy-harvesting batteries and other storage-constrained resource systems.

In electric delivery fleets, mid-shift charging is non-trivial: each vehicle must decide when, where and how much to charge to finish on time with battery above a safety floor. The choices are coupled: queues build where too many vehicles pick the same station. Prior work resolves this coupling with central dispatching, precomputed schedules or reservations, machinery that charging infrastructure rarely supports. Instead, we use a family of learning agents under purely local control: every vehicle runs the same policy, deciding alone from its time budgets and broadcast station occupancies, leading to emergent coordination without central control or messaging. We validate this paradigm in simulation on real OpenStreetMap networks of twenty cities, each with a frozen scenario calibrated by an omniscient Oracle (99.5% of shifts completed on time), whereas a naive greedy rule (nearest station on low battery) completes just 73%. Agents trained with neuroevolution (NEAT) and policy gradients (PPO) on four cities and deployed zero-shot across all twenty, sixteen never seen in training, complete 96.8% and 98.6% of shifts, with the policy-gradient controllers proving more robust when demand or vehicle characteristics drift beyond the trained regime. In contrast, tuned threshold heuristics that read vehicle urgency alone fall short in contended cities (~80%). Through training, these learning agents rediscover partial charging and short opportunistic sessions, and route around busy stations, cutting per-session queue waits from about 45 minutes to under 2. In summary, this coordination paradigm balances local urgency against public occupancy, reaching near-Oracle performance at minimal implementation cost.

Data-driven power-system models are typically developed for specific grids and computational tasks, but their performance can deteriorate markedly or even fail when network structures or analytical objectives change. This paper develops a unified grid representation that separates physical-grid description from downstream computation. A self-supervised encoder represents each grid as a variable number of fixed-dimensional node, branch and global vectors under a common latent description. Although pretrained only on systems with at most 270 buses, the frozen encoder transfers without adaptation to a 70,000-bus network, more than 250 times larger in bus count, while preserving 0.7919 bus-correspondence accuracy. The same representation supports four independently trained downstream tasks: power-flow calculation, reactive-power adjustment, operating-condition generation and transient-stability assessment. On the previously unseen 70,000-bus grid, power-flow calculation achieves mean errors of 0.108$^{\circ}$ in phase angle and 3.8$\times$10\textsuperscript{-6} p.u. in voltage magnitude. Reactive-power adjustment achieved a 75% PSASP-verified correction rate on the previously unseen 70,000-bus grid, while operating-condition generation delivered at least one PSASP-verified feasible state for 82.2% of requests on previously unseen 400–1,000-bus grid families. For transient-stability assessment, the frozen encoder achieves accuracy within 0.8 percentage points of full encoder adaptation under matched training conditions. These results demonstrate that a unified power-grid representation can be learned once and reused unchanged across structurally different power systems and heterogeneous computational tasks.

Luminescence-based chemical sensors are almost universally read as point detectors with the signal inverted through a single calibration model. Here we reframe optical oxygen sensing as a computer vision problem, in which the sensing film acts as a spatially heterogeneous encoder and a pretrained Temporal Vision Transformer (TViT) as its decoder. The heterogeneity in film thickness, diffusion path length and illumination translate to pixels that provide complementary information on the underlying diffusion dynamics. We achieved up to 54% lower mean absolute error (MAE) by increasing the internal diversity in performance of a pixel group; a gain that linear models cannot reproduce. Using a low-cost platform comprising a Raspberry Pi camera, a UV LED and a porous PtOEP/polystyrene film in tandem with a TViT architecture yielded an MAE of ~6.7 {\mu}mol/L, a 96% reduction from the two-site Stern-Volmer (SV) model. We showed that this framework can computationally mitigate the fundamental trade-off between mechanical robustness and temporal response in diffusion limited oxygen sensing by reducing T90 response times by 91%, while exhibiting physically plausible dynamics under a Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother (2.3% flag rate). The framework was applied across setups, environments and biofilm states, establishing an IoT-compatible paradigm for computationally compensated diffusion-limited chemical sensing.

Oversized heating and cooling equipment can unnecessarily increase up-front costs, energy costs, pollutant emissions, and strain on electrical infrastructure. This paper develops two data-driven methods for estimating heating loads at design conditions to improve equipment sizing. One method uses smart thermostat data; the other uses utility bills. We test the methods on a dataset that we gathered from 74 detached single-family houses in five United States climate zones. The dataset includes smart thermostat time-series data, monthly utility bills, weather data, existing equipment specifications, and Manual J design load calculations (the United States industry standard) purchased from practitioners. The two methods have strong goodness-of-fit statistics individually and show fair agreement with each other. On average over the 74 houses, existing heating equipment is 2.75 (2.5th to 97.5th empirical percentile: 1.34-6.52) times larger than the thermostat-method estimate and 2.96 (1.36-7.76 times larger than the bill-method estimate. As implemented by practitioners, the Manual J estimate is 2.26 (0.87-5.21) times larger on average than the thermostat-method estimate and 2.35 (1.02-5.28) times larger than the bill-method estimate. We discuss prospects for implementing the data-driven methods at scale and for incorporating data-driven sizing into industry standards.

Environments are increasingly populated by multiple robots performing independent tasks with limited prior knowledge of each other. Deploying such multi-agent systems presents significant challenges. Specifically, shifts in deployment states compared to training data can lead to poor policy performance and compromised safety. While safety shields exist to mitigate these risks, they are typically reactive, which degrades performance near unseen obstacles,and centralized, limiting their scalability. To address this, we propose a decentralized framework that integrates predictive shielding with model-based finite horizon Q-learning. This approach allows agents to safely adapt their pre-trained policies during deployment. Furthermore, to mitigate livelocks in symmetric scenarios, we introduce a communication- free protocol for conflict resolution

Direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation in adverse weather is degraded by propagation-induced phase and amplitude distortions that violate the covariance structure assumed by classical subspace methods. Motivated by a physics-based model of rain propagation, we develop a structured covariance formulation for rain-distorted arrays in both single- and multi-source scenarios. A key ingredient is to relax the physically parameterized distortion model and instead model the distortion covariance as an unknown real-valued Hermitian Toeplitz matrix. For the single-source case, we derive a closed-form covariance-matching calibration algorithm and provide structured-covariance and physics-informed Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs). For the multi-source case, we prove that the original per-source distortion model is non-identifiable and introduce a collinear approximation across angles. Under this approximation, we propose three multi-source calibration methods: alternating LASSO, joint LASSO, and a joint nuclear-norm formulation. Simulations under heavy rain demonstrate improved DoA accuracy and source resolvability compared with conventional baselines, highlighting the benefit of structured covariance modeling and calibration for safety-critical sensing.

Continuous-time affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) waveforms, constructed via frequency wrapping and phase correction, are known to be sample-wise equivalent to the widely adopted discrete AFDM framework. In this paper, we uncover a fundamental and previously overlooked flaw in this construction: its complex envelope is inherently discontinuous for generic chirp parameters. We show that these discontinuities are the direct cause of the high out-of-band emission (OOBE). To resolve this issue, we propose a fundamentally different continuous-time waveform, termed stepped frequency division multiplexing (SFDM). Unlike conventional approaches that allow continuous frequency variation, SFDM freezes the instantaneous frequency at the midpoint of the underlying chirp trajectory within each Nyquist sampling interval. This design yields a complex envelope that is strictly continuous over the entire symbol duration while preserving exact sample-wise equivalence with discrete AFDM. A unified spectral analysis reveals that the superior OOBE performance of SFDM stems from the absence of internal jump discontinuities, which otherwise dominate the far-out spectral roll-off. Numerical results confirm that SFDM consistently achieves significantly lower OOBE across a wide range of chirp rates.

This research proposes a model-free inverse approach for identifying the nonlinear anisotropic single-valued magnetic constitutive characteristics of soft magnetic materials from boundary measurements. Using the harmonic approximation, the internal magnetic flux density B and magnetic field strength H are independently reconstructed from the measured boundary data, thus avoiding the limitation of using a predefined parametric B–H mapping function. Subsequently, the reconstructed fields are spatially averaged along selected collection lines to recover the B–H characteristics of the principal directions. Numerical results demonstrate high reconstruction accuracy for unperturbed data and good robustness against Gaussian perturbations of the boundary measurements, with the overall mean error remaining below 5% for a 10% noise level. These results indicate that under the harmonic-field assumptions, the field-based reconstruction provides a simple and computationally efficient framework for non-invasive identification of nonlinear anisotropic magnetic constitutive characteristics.

This paper proposes an end-to-end generative framework for efficiently solving multi-period and multi-scenario stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) problems under nonlinear AC power-flow constraints. Conventional deterministic neural surrogates rely on a single-shot prediction, which makes reliable feasibility difficult to achieve because one dispatch trajectory must simultaneously satisfy nonlinear constraints across all scenarios and time periods. To address this limitation, a conditional stochastic neural generator (CSNG) is developed to produce multiple candidate dispatch trajectories for each uncertainty instance, enabling the recovery of a feasible and economical solution through candidate selection. A feasibility-aware self-supervised distribution-shaping scheme is further introduced to promote constraint satisfaction, candidate diversity, and operating economy without requiring computationally expensive SMPC solution labels, while mitigating candidate collapse in generative ACOPF learning. To support efficient end-to-end training, a constraint-aware differentiable architecture is introduced. It employs a projection mechanism to exactly enforce box and ramping constraints while preserving informative gradients near active bounds, together with a differentiable equality-completion surrogate for efficient AC power-flow reconstruction. Case studies on the IEEE 14- and 118-bus systems demonstrate $100\%$ feasibility, optimality gaps below $2\%$, and computational efficiency suitable for intraday dispatch. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/JieZhu6/Generative_SMPC.

In this article, we propose an online electronic counter-countermeasure (ECCM) framework designed to conceal the strategic decision-making processes of a cognitive radar (CR) operating under adversarial surveillance. We model the CR under two distinct decision paradigms: a static constrained utility-maximizing behavior and a dynamic expected utility-maximizing behavior. The radar's utility function is modeled via a von Mises–Fisher (vMF) distribution, with the distributional parameter constituting the private information to be protected from adversarial inference. We adopt a distribution privacy framework to conceal this private information and provide formal distribution privacy guarantees for cognition masking. In this work, we develop cognition-hiding algorithms for both static constrained utility maximization (WDPCH-SU), and dynamic expected utility maximization (WDPCH-DU). Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we show that both WDPCH-SU and WDPCH-DU satisfy $\epsilon$-distribution privacy ($\epsilon$-DistP) against inference-based adversarial attacks and present the privacy–performance trade-off bounds, quantifying utility loss (in static setting) and expected utility deviation (in dynamic setting) as functions of $\epsilon$. Numerical results show that WDPCH-SU gives about 15% improvement in utility loss at maximum privacy compared to the existing methodology while WDPCH-DU achieves a greater reduction in adversarial Fisher information without requiring explicit Fisher information constraints, at a moderate, analytically bounded utility deviation. These results are highly promising in many 6G communication scenarios such as network slicing for automated driving and swarm UAV coordination, where it is essential to keep the resource allocation policy robust against privacy attacks.

Underwater acoustic target recognition has converged on closed-set classification by vessel type, a task that does not answer whether a monitoring system has heard this hull before. We formalise open-set, cross-passage vessel re-identification on public hydrophone data and specify a protocol that removes the two easiest routes to a high score: hull-disjoint splits keyed to MMSI/IMO, galleries and queries from disjoint passages of each hull, source-pure galleries, and an audio-adjudicated transit-deduplication gate. We describe SKANN, a raw-waveform encoder whose front end is a four-scale bank of learned filters fused by selective-kernel attention, trained with an angular-margin objective and an augmentation regime that perturbs recording chain, ambient noise and multipath while preserving the narrowband lines that carry identity. On a 40-hull IARA gallery (96 queries, 98 passage candidates), cross-passage rank-1 is 0.25 for the embedding and 0.26 for an automated narrowband-tonal comparator; the two are statistically indistinguishable at the top of the ranking, the embedding orders the rest of the list more reliably (AUC 0.82 vs 0.76), and their score fusion reaches rank-1 0.35 – the only contrast that attains nominal significance, presented as evidence of partial complementarity, not as a recommendation. Transit deduplication alone removes a 16-21 point apparent rank-1 advantage, larger than any between-method difference. Two further findings delimit what public data can support: ShipsEar cannot separate hull identity from recording channel under an identity protocol, and cross-network fine-tuning helps vessels seen during fine-tuning but is a null result on unseen ones. The results support analyst triage over a ranked shortlist, not identification. Checkpoint, validation embeddings, transit map and per-query outputs are released under CC-BY-4.0 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.22160138).

Part I of this paper presented a decentralised framework for certifying small-signal stability in AC grids using frequency-domain quadratic constraints on individual grid subsystems. Part II extends the framework to a broader class of networks that contain unstable subsystems. In particular, we show that such unstable subsystems arise in many common scenarios, even when the aggregate system is stable and well behaved. Such subsystems must be stabilised by the closed-loop network interconnection, which complicates decentralised stability analysis. A stable hybrid representation resembling the power (PQ) model at low frequencies and the impedance (IV) model at high frequencies is then defined, to which the stability framework of Part I can be applied, allowing plug-and-play compatible conditions to be formulated. Furthermore, we show that at low frequencies, the characteristic loci in the Nyquist plot of the return ratio in this hybrid representation decouple into unbounded and bounded branches along the classical $P$-$\delta$ / $Q$-$V$ separation, and give sufficient conditions on each branch for ensuring system stability. The results are validated on the Kundur two-area system, where stability is certified, with a decentralised, plug-and-play compatible grid code covering the frequency ranges in which electromagnetic interactions arise.

The rise of renewable generation in AC power systems calls for small-signal stability assessment methods that do not rely on centralised, system-wide models. In this two-part paper, we present a decentralised stability framework based on frequency-domain conditions imposed on local subsystems (many admitting equivalent graphical interpretations) which collectively imply the stability of the entire grid. The framework generalises many previously reported results, with added flexibility and plug-and-play compatibility provided by the additional degrees of freedom of the imposed conditions, the ability to mix conditions across frequency ranges, conditions on extended subsystems that couple buses to their connecting lines and loads, and a method to incorporate unstable subsystems. Detailed, heterogeneous device and line models are accommodated in the frequency domain using impedance, admittance, and power-flow models, making the framework suitable as a foundation for grid codes that enable plug-and-play functionality in inverter-dominated grids. Part I focuses on stable impedance and admittance representations and Part II extends the results to unstable subsystems, which are shown to be fundamentally present in many grid models. The results of Part I are validated on a modified 9-bus case study, demonstrating the reduced conservatism and significance of the proposed approach.

Battery cell design must balance energy density, fast charging, and degradation, yet these metrics evolve over different time scales and are costly to optimize jointly. We develop a timescale-aware surrogate-assisted framework that evaluates beginning-of-life volumetric energy density and 10–80% charging time together with state-of-health (SOH) loss over 200 cycles. Physics-based simulations of 1501 cell designs generate 1427 quality-controlled samples across 12 manufacturing-relevant parameters. Objective-specific surrogates support total-order Sobol analysis, which reveals distinct parameter rankings across the three metrics. A cross-objective rank-union strategy then retains variables influential to at least one objective before evolutionary Pareto optimization. Re-evaluation of the optimized candidates using the original physics-based models confirms designs that outperform the reference cell in all three metrics. Among these jointly improving candidates, the objective-wise best solutions, attained by different designs, can reduce SOH loss by 99.31%, increase volumetric energy density by 12.49%, and shorten charging time by 28.73%. The framework makes Pareto exploration across disparate electrochemical timescales computationally tractable, thereby enabling systematic multi-objective optimization of battery cell design.

In this paper, we analyze and compare the performance of LoRa and LR-FHSS in a remote area Internet-of-Things (IoT) connectivity scenario using a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites and high-altitude platform station (HAPS)-mounted gateway. We conducted a link budget analysis to evaluate communication stability to assess the ability of the technologies to support the different distances and behaviors using a 3GPP channel model for non-terrestrial networks. Several parameters are considered, such as altitude, minimum elevation angle as well as the impact of different types of loss, such as shadow and fast fading, ionosphere scintillation loss, for example. Our findings highlight the performance gap between LR-FHSS and LoRa in terms of both connectivity. We also highlight how lower HAPS altitudes can benefit certain LoRa settings compared to LEO satellites. We show that HAPS can enable the use of lower LoRa spreading factors, which improves scalability and energy efficiency, while LR-FHSS and a higher spreading factor LoRa remain the solution for LEO satellites.

Controller design for physical systems directly from data is of tremendous interest in both the industry and academia. However, the research on direct data-driven control has thus far mainly focused on discrete-time linear time-invariant systems. To make the highly non-trivial step to continuous-time nonlinear systems, this paper explores an intermediate route through the framework of linear parameter-varying (LPV) systems. LPV systems can be used as a convenient surrogate for nonlinear systems to achieve systematic analysis and controller design. In this work, we generalize the LPV Fundamental Lemma for discrete-time systems towards a class of continuous-time LPV systems, achieving data-driven representations that can be used to design continuous-time LPV controllers.

A general method for the estimation and removal of quasi-periodic, artifact-like disturbances from single channel measurements is presented. The method is based on a wavelet template and data-driven template extraction from single channel, noisy signals. The method is tested on an example application in modern neurology. The method is compared to an autoencoder, trained and deployed under idealized conditions, thus acting as reference system. It is found that the proposed method yields signal estimates with median root mean squared error improvement of 33% compared to the baseline, which is 4% more than the autoencoder, while relying on fewer assumptions and parameters, and without the need for any training data.

Conventional active noise control (ANC) minimizes the total disturbance at the error microphone without distinguishing desired sound from noise. Direction-preserving ANC (DP-ANC) instead aims to attenuate a noise component arriving from a direction other than the specified desired direction while preserving sound naturally arriving from that direction. Existing approaches typically either require analytical optimization to be repeated for each new observation or estimate and reproduce the desired component through a hear-through secondary-source path. To address these limitations, this paper formulates DP-ANC as a direction-conditioned cancellation-preservation optimization problem. A component-separated objective jointly penalizes residual noise energy and the control response induced by the desired component, with a scalar weighting parameter controlling the cancellation-preservation trade-off. A convolutional network conditioned on the specified desired direction through feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) is trained using a differentiable secondary-path-aware forward model. At deployment, the network estimates the complete multichannel finite impulse response (FIR) control-filter bank directly from a mixed-reference observation and the specified desired direction in a single forward pass, while retaining the conventional feedforward ANC signal path. Over 3300 evaluation cases, the selected operating point achieves 22.8 dB mean noise reduction with a desired-signal distortion of -11.4 dB. Validation using measured in-ear-device transfer functions further demonstrates consistent performance under measured acoustic configurations.