Papers

Operator splitting methods are a fundamental class of algorithms for solving structured monotone inclusion problems arising in optimization, control, and game theory. We consider the case, common in stochastic regimes, where the forward evaluation of one of the constituent operators is either unavailable in closed form or computationally expensive to evaluate, and is therefore approximated using a finite number of noisy oracle samples. We establish distribution-free, finite-sample certificates for the quality of the output produced by data-driven Davis-Yin splitting algorithms. Unlike previous works, our analysis directly controls the residual error via martingale inequalities instead of relying on algorithmic stability arguments for a tailored surrogate loss, yielding the first a priori certificates whose statistical excess provably vanishes with the sample size. We further show that, under linear convergence of the Davis-Yin splitting algorithm, the dependence of our bounds on the iteration count improves from linear growth to exponential decay. We validate our theoretical results on a stochastic portfolio optimization problem with uncertain asset returns.

Physical-layer key generation (PKG) enables wireless devices to establish shared keys from reciprocal channel observations without directly exchanging the key. This capability is attractive for edge networks, where distributed and resource-constrained devices may require lightweight key establishment with limited access to centralized infrastructure. We introduce a channel-informed neural network for PKG that derives binary key features directly from received IQ measurements while explicitly grounding the learned representation in the underlying multipath channel. The proposed multi-task recurrent neural network jointly learns reciprocity-preserving binary features and an auxiliary channel estimate using a training objective that combines deep metric learning with channel-informed supervision. Structured channel sounding enables channel estimation from over-the-air measurements, while Sionna-RT ray tracing is used to augment training with additional propagation conditions. We evaluate the framework using indoor and outdoor software-defined-radio measurements collected on the POWDER radio testbed. Across all evaluated scenarios, the proposed model produces lower bit disagreement for reciprocal Alice-Bob observations than for Eve-related observations. Ray-traced data augmentation substantially improves key diversity, increasing the unique-key rate to 0.94, 0.99, and 0.99 across the indoor and two outdoor scenarios, respectively. Successfully reconciled channel-informed keys pass the selected NIST randomness tests prior to SHA-3 privacy amplification. The results demonstrate the potential of channel-informed representation learning for decentralized wireless key establishment while highlighting an important tradeoff between key diversity and reconciliation reliability.

Song generation and editing have mostly been treated as separate tasks. Existing editing methods often require noise injection and regeneration or curated paired training data. We propose a unified approach for song generation and editing based on reconstructive pretraining, in which a model is trained to reconstruct audio from varying numbers of interpretable conditions. With conditions such as text and lyrics, the model learns to generate diverse songs. With dense conditions specifying fine-grained music attributes, the model learns to reconstruct the target and enables editing by modifying any single attribute while keeping others fixed. This leads to SongCraft, a latent flow matching based model trained for both generation and fine-grained editing. To improve song generation quality, we further introduce word-level phoneme alignment that improves pronunciation learning and accelerates convergence, beat conditioning that improves general musicality, and representation alignment on VAE latent space that produces semantically meaningful latents for improved generation quality. Experiments show that SongCraft achieves the lowest word error rate among evaluated song generation baselines while maintaining competitive audio quality. We further show that a single model can support editing of lyrics, vocal melody, beats, and singer identity, and we also study the trade-off between reconstruction quality and editability.

Domain Randomization (DR) has been widely used to overcome the sim-to-real gap by training a controller on a distribution of simulated environments via reinforcement learning. While DR can achieve robust performance simply using controllers synthesized via policy gradient (PG) methods, the optimization landscape is not well understood, even in the case of linear quadratic regulator (LQR) objectives. To this end, we first study PG of domain randomized LQR over history-dependent policy classes, such as finite impulse response controllers, as they can extend the possibilities of simultaneous stabilization. Second, to find such a stabilizing controller, we propose a curriculum learning based algorithm which gradually expands the memory of the controller. Finally, we show that PG with the proposed algorithm converges globally to the minimizer of a sample average approximation of the DR objective under suitable bounds on the heterogeneity of environments. Empirical results support our findings and highlight promising directions for future work, including nonlinear domain-randomized control.

The practical implementation of pinching-antenna systems (PASS) is challenging due to hardware limitations in large-scale antenna movement and continuous radiation power adjustment. This paper proposes a practical PASS-enabled downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output communication framework that enables discrete radiation power control and localized discrete antenna movement. Specifically, a discrete coupling strength model is exploited to tune the radiation power at each pinching antenna (PA) through quantized coupling spacing levels. Moreover, each PA can only move among discrete locations within a limited region determined by the movement speed and duration. Based on the proposed framework, a joint optimization problem of the PA positions, coupling strength, and transmit beamforming is formulated. Considering waveguide attenuation, the total average power consumption is minimized, subject to each user's minimum SINR requirement and localized motion constraints. To address this coupled mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem, a globally optimal branch-and-bound-based algorithm is first developed for the multi-waveguide single-user scenario. To further reduce complexity, a scalable genetic algorithm-assisted particle swarm optimization (GA-PSO) method is developed for the multi-waveguide multi-user scenario, where GA operations are incorporated to preserve population diversity and alleviate premature convergence. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design significantly reduces the power consumption compared with the conventional PASS schemes and MIMO architectures.

Emerging physical AI systems require low-latency, task-oriented video communication over unreliable channels. We propose a semantic-aware multi-level neural video coding method for robust low-latency video transmission over unreliable channels that are abstracted as multi-level packet erasure channels. Built upon the real-time DCVC-RT neural video codec, the proposed framework introduces a semantic- and feature-aware coding strategy that partitions encoded representations into packets carrying different levels of semantic and latent-feature importance and assigns these packets to different streams, each associated with a priority level when transmitted over unreliable communication channels. We also developed an error-resilient entropy model that removes inter-packet dependencies, allowing each packet to be decoded independently under packet losses. The complete system is trained end-to-end over the abstracted multi-level packet erasure channels, enabling learning of channel-aware representations together with importance-aware packet assignment while facilitating the network for differentiated packet prioritization. Experiments show that the proposed framework significantly improves robustness over baseline DCVC-RT under packet erasures, achieving graceful degradation in less important regions while better preserving task-relevant visual content.

The ongoing replacement of synchronous generation by inverter-based resources (IBRs) introduces fast converter control dynamics whose characteristic frequencies extend beyond the classical electromechanical band. Conventional small-signal stability tools are commonly formulated in the phasor domain, representing electrical quantities as slowly varying phasors at the fundamental frequency, and therefore cannot resolve the sub-synchronous and converter-driven dynamics that increasingly arise in operation. Electromagnetic Transient (EMT) modeling captures these dynamics, but established EMT simulators produce time-domain waveforms rather than the modal indicators (eigenvalues, damping ratios, and participation factors) needed to assess stability risk. This paper presents EMT-SSA, an integrated tool suite for EMT-level small-signal analysis of IBR-rich power systems. From a standard PSS/E system snapshot (.raw/.dyr), it converts the model into an EMT representation with enhanced fidelity, solves an extended power flow for the steady-state equilibrium points of both the network and the device controllers, and linearizes a full-order EMT model to form the system state matrix, from which it produces eigenvalues, oscillation modes, and participation factor analysis results over a device library spanning synchronous generators, grid-following and grid-forming inverters, transmission lines, and loads. The EMT-SSA tool suite identifies poorly damped or unstable modes and attributes them to specific devices. The tool is demonstrated on the Kundur two-area system, with its modal results benchmarked against PSS/E NEVA.

Continuum robots enable smooth shape morphing and safe interaction in confined environments. However, most existing systems are task-specific and depend on external sensing infrastructure, limiting their adaptability and real-world deployment. This paper presents a self-contained modular continuum robotic platform that combines mechanical reconfigurability with onboard pose estimation. The robot is constructed from interchangeable continuum joints with analytically precomputed stiffness, allowing rapid assembly and direct programming of the robot shape. Proprioceptive sensing is achieved using magnetic sensors and a modular learning-based framework, where a single model is trained per joint and reused across configurations. The system is experimentally validated in real world, demonstrating self-sensing capabilities and adaptation without external tracking.

Photoplethysmography (PPG)-based heart-rate (HR) estimation on smartphones remains unreliable in free-living conditions because motion artifacts vary in spectral structure across activities, and benchmarks such as BUT PPG v2.0 label signal quality only as binary good or bad, discarding partially usable data. This study develops an HR estimation architecture that explicitly conditions motion type and signal quality rather than treating both uniformly. We propose MoWaveQFormer, a three-stage architecture trained under ECG supervision. Stage 1 assigns each window a discrete motion group based on accelerometer-derived spectral energy, without trainable parameters. Stage 2 uses this index to select one of the three learnable FIR filter banks for motion-specific spectral shaping of the PPG signal. Stage 3 embeds the resulting sub-bands into patch tokens, re-weights them via a differentiable soft gate derived from the quality label, and encodes them with a Transformer whose pooled output is regressed to HR, trained jointly with an ECG-supervised loss and a pulse-transit-time consistency term. In a subject-independent split of BUT PPG v2.0 (3,888 recordings, 50 subjects), MoWaveQFormer achieved a mean absolute error of 7.85 bpm, the lowest among five methods, with significant improvements over three baselines (Wilcoxon test, p<0.05). Ablation and Bland-Altman analyses characterize each component's contribution. With 816,445 parameters and sub-3-ms latency, MoWaveQFormer suits real-time deployment, pending validation on smartphone hardware. Replacing motion-agnostic filtering and binary quality discarding with differentiable conditioned processing offers a compact pathway to more reliable free-living PPG-based cardiovascular monitoring.

This article describes an open image dataset for developing and evaluating active-fire segmentation methods in satellite imagery. The dataset contains 2,148 image-mask pairs from 25 California wildfires, with acquisitions spanning July 2020 to August 2026. Each image is a 512x512-pixel, three-channel composite derived from Sentinel-2 Level-2A bands B12, B11 and B8A at 20 m spatial sampling. A fixed linear rendering is applied throughout the dataset. Corresponding masks distinguish background, SWIR-rule active fire and invalid observations. The masks were generated from shortwave-infrared brightness and near-infrared contrast, followed by constrained neighborhood growth. The release includes chip-level metadata and an incident-disjoint partition containing 18 training, three validation and four test fires. Among the image pairs, 841 contain active-fire labels; these labels occupy 0.0766% of all grid cells. A mask-blind analyst review covers 233 test chips and provides a separate assessment of the rule-generated labels at chip and connected-component levels. Reference training and evaluation code accompanies the data, including a ResNet-34 U-Net implementation with validation-based checkpoint and threshold selection. The archived images, masks, metadata and review annotations support research on rare-class segmentation, learning from algorithmic labels and transfer across fire incidents. The versioned dataset is deposited on Zenodo, with preparation and reuse software maintained in a public GitHub repository.

The rapid proliferation of power electronic loads at the distribution grid edge has made accurate harmonic load modeling critical for power quality assessment, transformer derating, and grid planning. Existing Frequency Coupling Matrix (FCM) identification methods produce static, one-time models that rapidly lose fidelity as load composition evolves. This paper proposes a distributed edge-to-cloud architecture for autonomous, continual FCM re-identification under real field conditions, with two contributions: (i) a state-machine-driven pipeline that monitors point-on-wave (PoW) measurements and triggers FCM re-identification only upon statistically significant load change; and (ii) an edge-to-server architecture confining waveform processing to a low-cost Raspberry Pi node, transmitting only compact JSON model updates upon confirmed change rather than streaming raw PoW data. Validated through a residential field deployment, the framework correctly triggered retraining in 3 of 31 monitoring cycles while maintaining harmonic accuracy above the 80% threshold, reducing upstream data transmission by 99.6% relative to continuous streaming.

Working agricultural landscapes are often treated as background to wildfire disasters, even though they are managed fuel mosaics, productive assets, and parts of regional infrastructure systems. We examine vineyard wildfire resilience during the electrically initiated 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, California, using an open, event-anchored geospatial framework spanning 4,581 vineyard fields (8,813.2 ha), wildland vegetation, surveyed structures, roads, overhead smoke, and post-fire greenness. Sentinel-2, OpenET, gridMET, soils, terrain, NOAA smoke polygons, an ignition-date OpenStreetMap network, and three-dimensional data inventories were analyzed at native decision scales. Vineyard pixels showed substantially lower descriptive dNBR than wildland pixels inside the perimeter (means 0.130 and 0.337). This contrast did not identify a universal vineyard firebreak effect: a segment-clustered boundary model gave a small negative contrast at 100 m (tau = -0.0166) but changed across bandwidths, failed slope continuity, disappeared in a 100 m donut, and produced a wrong-signed placebo. A 250 m spatial GAM reversed the unconditional pattern: after conditioning on location, terrain, and water use, vineyard fraction was positively associated with dNBR, while residual Moran's I remained 0.519. Beyond spectral impact, all mapped vineyards intersected overhead smoke on at least one day (mean 7.78 potential smoke-days per field), 34.2% of road-network nodes were dead ends, and inside-perimeter vineyards showed a larger greenness deficit through 2021 (recovery ratios 0.815 inside and 0.854 outside). Lower immediate spectral impact therefore did not imply complete resilience. The study provides a reproducible urban-rural informatics template separating descriptive contrasts, conditional associations, exposure indicators, and recovery evidence for decisions in working landscapes.

The sharp increase in mass shootings underscores an urgent need for systems that guide victims to safety in real time. An effective evacuation system must minimize threat exposure while also accounting for adversarial uncertainty and crowding dynamics. Current methods in the literature are rigidly constrained to layout-specific policies and computationally intractable in large-scale layouts, while practical guidelines simply advise victims to "run", "hide", or "fight". We propose GPEvac: a GNN-based PPO framework that computes adaptive evacuation routes during shooting events. To capture both local and long-distance dependencies, we introduce an edge-first sequential message-passing scheme with a learnable virtual global node. The resulting graph embeddings are integrated into a permutation-invariant scoring mechanism that allows a single learned policy to operate across building layouts of diverse topologies and sizes. Through extensive simulation, we show that GPEvac outperforms intelligent baselines across distinct architectural layouts, significantly reducing total threat exposure. Crucially, the system computes global evacuation routes in just 14.73 ms on local CPU hardware, enabling seamless integration with live surveillance systems. In addition to saving lives during shooting events, the methodologies developed are transferable to other graph-structured decision-making domains, including critical infrastructure, intelligent transportation systems, and adaptive sensor networks.

Room impulse responses can be estimated via the image source model (ISM) using the image source point cloud (ISPC) of a physical source. However, because the source movement changes the ISPC, estimating the ISPC at a new source position typically requires repeated acoustic measurements. We propose an optimal transport (OT) barycenter framework to interpolate the ISPC of a new source location from ISPCs of known sources. The method jointly estimates image-source associations and the ISPC at the new location. The OT ground cost exploits the property that the image sources undergo the same displacement as their physical sources. This approach is realized for both grid-based and support-free configurations. The support-free method addresses the resulting nonconvex joint estimation problem by alternating between identifying image-source associations across the ISPCs and refining the target image-source locations. This enables the interpolation of ISPCs without repeated measurements, facilitating efficient and flexible room-acoustic modeling.

Multiscale Visibility Theory (MVT) is introduced as a task-relative operator-geometric framework for determining how prescribed information survives and remains accessible through a structured observation architecture. Rather than evaluating observation quality by transform magnitude, output energy, rank, or signal prominence alone, MVT measures the accessibility of a specified task direction or task subspace through the row space of the composite operator A_A = R_E W_rho H_beta P_Omega. Unlike projection-based diagnostic frameworks centered on discrimination between nominal and fault-related system behavior, MVT tracks an independently prescribed task as observation architecture, scale, representation, and retained access vary. The formulation unifies exact stagewise retention, task-subspace preservation, scale-indexed visibility and stability, worst-case erasure robustness, collective visibility, covariance-normalized statistical separation, and decision sufficiency while keeping geometric accessibility, statistical detectability, and decision adequacy mathematically distinct. A reproducible MATLAB implementation verifies the analytical relations using a controlled synthetic benchmark with a weak 260-Hz prescribed task and a stronger 380-Hz nuisance. Within the same frequency-indexed observation family, task visibility is maximized at 260 Hz, whereas complete-signal observation energy is maximized at 380 Hz. At the nominal noise level, D_max = 18 > Gamma_D = 8.563847350668, yielding a decision-visible interval of 258.5-261.5 Hz. A four-row phase-redundant observer preserves full task-model visibility through two row erasures, while two individually subthreshold branches at 258 and 262 Hz become jointly decision-visible with D_12 = 10.470833520729. All 12 numerical audits satisfy the 10^-10 tolerance.

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) enables agents to adapt to unseen tasks with limited experience. Despite its promise, the application of meta-RL in real-world tasks is hindered by safety requirements, which have been underexplored in prior work. In this paper, we propose a safe meta-RL framework that explicitly accounts for safety during adaptation. Our key insight is to reason about safety in the information space, which captures both the physical state and the agent's belief over the underlying task. Within this space, we introduce a safety value function that measures the probability of the agent avoiding unsafe regions indefinitely. We show that this function satisfies a self-consistency condition and a Bellman equation, which make it learnable via meta-RL. Based on this formulation, we develop a safe meta-RL algorithm that learns the safety value function and leverages it for safety filtering and constrained policy optimization. Experiments on meta-RL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Physical AI relies on frequently-updated, latency-sensitive video stream to perceive, reason, and interact with the physical world, resulting in strict latency requirements with much higher data volumes that existing 5G networks cannot support. Goal-oriented communication (GoC) offers as a promising approach to solve this challenge by transmitting only task-relevant semantic representations. However, existing GoC frameworks were mainly evaluated in the simulations while their effectiveness has never been validated in a practical deployment of physical AI application. In this work, we develop an end-to-end GoC testbed for Physical AI, which connects a PiPER robot arm equipped with an RGB-D camera and a 5G modem to an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin edge server through a 5G OpenAirInterface network. We propose and implement three GoC frameworks that transmit 3D bounding boxes, 2D scene graphs, and 3D scene graphs, as three types of semantic representations, respectively. They share the common functional modules designed for closed-loop Physical AI applications, including semantic extraction, full stack 5G transmission, language model inference, digital twin validation, and robotic control. Extensive experiments on our testbed show that our GoC frameworks reduce the task completion time by up to 52.6% and improve task success probability by up to 45%, compared to the traditional framework that periodically transmits the raw image data. These results validate the practical effectiveness of our GoC framework and pave the way for efficient and reliable Physical AI applications over future 6G networks. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/goc-physical-ai-testbed.

In this paper, we introduce the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) under arbitrary privacy requirements, in a graph-based storage system. This formulation is motivated by the server storage limitations, abundance of data (messages) and heterogeneous data privacy requirements. Under the arbitrary privacy requirement, each message has to be retrieved privately from a pre-specified subset of servers, where the subset always includes the servers storing it. Thus, each server is associated with a privacy set, which pre-specifies the message indices that should be privately retrieved from it. This setting is a generalization of the classical PIR setting, where the required message index needs to be kept private from all servers, i.e., there, the privacy set of each server comprises all message indices. Our setting is also a bridge between the newly formulated local PIR (LPIR) setting and the classical PIR setting, where in the former, the privacy set is exactly the set of stored message indices. In this paper, we derive general lower and upper bounds on the PIR capacity for general graphs, under certain privacy requirements, that capture the essence of both LPIR and classical PIR. Then, we focus on path and cyclic storage graphs under these and more fine-grained settings, for which we derive capacity results for certain cases, and establish lower and upper bounds for others. Their low degree allows for a more in-depth understanding of the new privacy formulation and admits more privacy requirement settings compared to other simple graphs. Finally, we introduce a new graph structure, the pyramid storage graph, to model server storage. Although this graph has never been investigated in the literature in any PIR context, it enjoys a nice symmetric structure for message storage and replication patterns.

In frequency-division duplex massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the user equipment (UE) must convey high-dimensional downlink channel state information (CSI) under a stringent finite-bit feedback budget. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful tool for CSI compression due to its ability to capture complex channel correlations and learn compact CSI representations. However, recovering fine-scale channel structure from limited feedback remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose the Coarse-to-Fine Channel Language Model (CoFi-CLM), a large AI model deployed at the base station (BS) that explicitly learns dependencies between coarse and fine CSI representations. Specifically, the UE reports coarse-token indices from a learned codebook, while CoFi-CLM predicts distributions over unreported fine-token indices conditioned on this feedback in a single Transformer forward pass. A dual-path decoder fuses the direct coarse reconstruction with the generated fine-scale reconstruction. Concentrating fine-token prediction and fusion at the BS allows the CLM capacity to scale without increasing the computational or storage cost at the UE. Across 64 to 160 feedback bits, CoFi-CLM consistently outperforms the compared methods on both seen and unseen scenarios. At 128 bits, it improves the normalized mean square error (NMSE) over the recent large AI model baseline by approximately 1 dB on both sets. The performance gap between seen and unseen scenarios further supports its generalization under the considered channel model. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/doovvv/CoFi-CLM.

This paper establishes a perfect-reconstruction (PR) interpretation of AddUNet and its full-rate realization, and introduces a Residual Full-Rate PR architecture for task-directed representation learning. The survivor–skip structure of a constrained additive U-Net is shown to be exactly equivalent to a critically sampled multirate PR filter bank. The full-rate formulation removes the complementary-subband restrictions of the critically sampled system while preserving PR. A Residual Full-Rate PR architecture is then proposed to progressively route task-irrelevant, nuisance, or redundant structure away from the task-facing survivor while retaining the routed information explicitly. Exact reconstruction is guaranteed for arbitrary shape-compatible linear or nonlinear routing operators, without requiring invertibility, a matched synthesis bank, reconstruction loss, or learned decoder. The resulting architecture decouples representation design from reconstruction design: conservation is structural, while learning is devoted to task-directed routing. The same formulation identifies an identity-shortcut ResNet with its residual output retained as a full-rate PR system. Experiments verify exact single-channel routing of linearly separable factors to machine precision. On TIMIT, the proposed front-end improves test PER from $28.60\pm2.09\%$ to $25.76\pm0.41\%$ with the recognizer and training protocol held fixed, while maintaining exact reconstruction. Speaker probing further shows that structural conservation does not itself imply task-specific invariance.

Spoofing attacks against civilian GNSS receivers have grown more common, especially near conflict zones where they now disrupt civil aviation, maritime operations, and critical infrastructure on a daily basis. Spoofing is possible because legacy civil GNSS signals are largely predictable in both their navigation data and ranging codes, allowing an attacker to forge a signal that imposes a false position and time on an unsuspecting receiver. Cryptographic authentication schemes such as Galileo's Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) mitigate this threat by verifying the authenticity of the navigation data. The ranging code itself, however, remains unprotected. To close this gap, Galileo is introducing a Signal Authentication Service (SAS) in the E6-C signal, which directly authenticates ranging measurements. SAS is currently transmitted by only two satellites in an elliptical orbital plane, of which at most one is visible at a time, meaning a full position solution is not yet possible; however, a georeferenced receiver can still obtain an authenticated time solution. This paper presents, to the authors' knowledge, for the first time, a timing solution computed from an authenticated civil GNSS signal. We develop a snapshot software receiver implementing a simplified version of the Galileo SAS protocol to compute the receiver clock bias from an authenticated pseudorange, using radio-frequency data recorded with an engineering prototype software-defined radio receiver from Septentrio. We evaluate the resulting timing solution using recordings from both SAS-capable satellites collected at different locations, demonstrating the feasibility of authenticated timing ahead of full SAS operational deployment.

Hydrogen-diesel dual-fuel (H2DF) combustion reduces combustion-out CO2 emissions but exhibits nonlinear cycle-to-cycle dynamics at high hydrogen energy shares (HES). This work evaluates nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) with a gated recurrent-unit deep neural network dynamics model for transient H2DF control. Trained on 99,800 engine cycles, the model predicts indicated mean effective pressure, nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter (PM), and maximum pressure-rise rate. Single-cylinder Cummins 4.5 L experiments follow an unseen 4,900-engine-cycle trajectory. Compared with production diesel-only control, NMPC improves load-tracking mean absolute error by 27.8% and reduces mean PM by 61.1%, while mean engine-out NOx increases by 105.1% without exhaust-gas recirculation. Mean and peak HES reach 39.7% and 55.1%; a high-hydrogen setting achieves 77.8% peak HES without constraint violations. Robust to feedback noise and model-plant mismatch and executing in 3 to 7 ms per engine cycle on low-cost embedded hardware, learned-dynamics NMPC enables practical, real-time, constraint-aware transient H2DF control with substantial diesel substitution.

Proximal bundle methods (PBMs) are classical algorithms for nonsmooth convex optimization. Existing analyses of the classical PBM couple the null steps with the descent test. This coupling obscures how the bundle updates approximate the proximal subproblem. In this work, we consider composite objectives $F=f+h$ and view each null-step cycle as an inner bundle subroutine, called $\mathtt{ProxBundle}$. We analyze $\mathtt{ProxBundle}$ independently of any stopping criterion under general bundle model conditions and show that it automatically adapts to Hölder smoothness. Combining this inner-loop analysis with the descent-step analysis yields sharper complexity bounds for the classical PBM. For any fixed proximal parameter, its overall complexity is $\mathcal O\big(\epsilon^{-\frac{3-\nu}{1+\nu}}\big)$ for $\nu\in[0,1)$ and $\mathcal O(\epsilon^{-1})$ for $\nu=1$, where $\nu$ is the Hölder smoothness exponent. Choosing the proximal parameter proportional to $\epsilon$ improves the rate to $\mathcal O\big(\epsilon^{-\frac{2}{1+\nu}}\big)$ for $\nu \in [0,1)$. These are the first guarantees under Hölder smoothness with $\nu\in(0,1)$ for the classical descent test. We further introduce an absolute model-error test. The resulting PBM variant admits a clean inexact proximal-point analysis, and for any fixed proximal parameter, achieves the same complexity $\mathcal O\big(\epsilon^{-\frac{2}{1+\nu}}\big)$. Overall, our analysis separates the roles of the descent and null steps and gives a modular understanding of PBMs across different~tests.

Latest advances in neural directional filtering show exceptional results in adapting the direction and shape of directivity patterns during the inference phase. However, in the existing methods for adapting directivity patterns during inference, important real-world constraints have been disregarded. Particularly for hearing devices, scenarios are often much more dynamic, microphone positions vary with head diameter and hearing aid placement, head-shadow effects occur, and strict latency constraints apply. In this work, we propose a novel low-latency (10 ms) deep neural network (DNN) taking the above requirements of hearing devices into account. As in recent work, we use feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) to steer the directivity patterns during testing. To preserve the desired directivity pattern, a loss function is proposed that maintains the spectral cross-channel relationships. Interestingly, we are able to achieve similar results to methods with relaxed latency constraints.

This paper studies the strategic market participation of a monopolistic energy storage aggregator (ESA) in a day-ahead electricity market. The ESA coordinates geographically distributed storage units, submits a coordinated bid for its portfolio, and may hold financial transmission rights (FTRs). The system operator clears the market through a network-constrained, multi-period economic dispatch, determining generation and load schedules, nodal prices, energy-market payments, and FTR payoffs. We formulate the ESA–system-operator interaction as a Stackelberg game and characterize its equilibrium through a constraint-binding-pattern decomposition of the market-clearing problem. Beyond enabling equilibrium computation, the framework reveals how the ESA can increase its profit by strategically inducing or avoiding particular constraint-binding patterns. It also establishes a novel welfare result: although strategic storage without FTRs is known to weakly improve social welfare relative to the no-storage case, certain FTR positions can overturn this guarantee by strengthening the ESA's incentive to induce particular patterns, causing social welfare to fall below the no-storage level. Motivated by these findings, we develop two system-operator mechanisms for limiting undesirable ESA behavior and its adverse effects on market outcomes and social welfare. Finally, a three-bus study illustrates the theoretical findings, while IEEE test systems demonstrate the scalability of the proposed method.

Computer vision systems are a key building block in an autonomous vehicle, responsible for a range of perception tasks. However, they incur massive data transmission over long communication links from multiple cameras, creating a critical bandwidth and energy bottleneck. Although conventional codecs such as H.264 can reduce data rates, they are ill-suited for real-time vision systems due to high processing latency and energy consumption, as well as their reliance on static user-defined compression settings. In light of these challenges, we propose OASIS, an adaptive video compression framework that integrates lightweight in-sensor compression with task-aware compression ratio control. Based on the real-time task performance, it dynamically updates the optimal compression ratio. Experimental results demonstrate that OASIS generalizes across multiple vision tasks, achieving on average a 6x data compression, 5.8x reduction in link power consumption, and 2.5x reduction in link latency, with at most 1.5% performance degradation.

We address the problem of color attribute compression for 3D splats. We show that all images generated by 3D splats are linear in the coefficients for each color channel, each spherical harmonic, and each splat, and we identify a basis for the space of all such images. We identify an inner product for the coefficient space that induces the squared error loss on images. We show that orthonormalizing the coefficients with respect to this innner product before coding can yield over 2 dB gain.

Industrial PID loops are still tuned by hand: step the setpoint, look at the response, change a gain. This paper turns that procedure into an algorithm, SPIN, for Step-response Phase-portrait INspection. From a single closed-loop step response we form three phase portraits of the control deviation and count how many times each trajectory winds around its settling point. The counts are dimensionless and independent of the step size and of the clock. They show which channel is under-damped: integral, proportional, or derivative. A triangular rule reads the three counts, cutting the gain of the one band whose fault is certain and raising that of every band the same test shows to be within its limit. No model is identified and no optimization is solved. The iteration is deterministic and its gains stay inside a fixed box. Because a ringing count is itself the evidence that the loop is in the regime where cutting that band's gain reduces the count, the iteration settles into a cycle at the edge of the well-damped set. It needs no excitation beyond a routine setpoint step, so it can run on a process in operation, and it may start from arbitrary gains, including destabilizing ones. SPIN assumes a stable, self-regulating process whose gain and phase both fall with frequency, which covers the lag-plus-dead-time models common in process control, and a controller from the nested family $\mathrm{I} \subset \mathrm{PI} \subset \mathrm{PID}$ with integral action present. We validate it on a battery of process-typical plants with one fixed step size and one set of dimensionless constants throughout. Every decision is visible: the operator sees what the algorithm sees. A reference implementation and an interactive demonstration are public.

The development of automated speaking assessment (ASA) is limited by the scarcity of public datasets, with most existing work relying on read-aloud speech, which limits applicability to real-world communication scenarios. In this work, we introduce OpenEnded, a corpus of English practice speech from Mandarin speakers in open-response tasks. Unlike prior open-response datasets that provide only holistic proficiency scores, OpenEnded offers utterance-level assessments of accuracy, fluency, and prosody. Approximately 10,000 utterances are collected and annotated using a hybrid framework: 1,000 are manually labeled via multi-rater scoring with discrepancy resolution to form a high-quality test set, while the remaining are pseudo-labeled by an audio language model (ALM) for training and development sets. We evaluate ALMs and existing ASA models on the OpenEnded test set and introduce VoxPA as an additional baseline. Results show that ALM-generated pseudo-labels improve training over original ALM scoring, while VoxPA achieves the best performance among all baselines.

Learning Model Predictive Control (LMPC) improves iterative control tasks by using previous executions to construct the terminal constraint and terminal cost of the MPC problem. Although effective, this reuse of past trajectories can make LMPC sensitive to the initial data. In particular, LMPC may repeatedly exploit stored trajectories with favorable cost-to-go values while insufficiently exploring alternative route patterns that could yield lower cost after further improvement. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Modal LMPC (MM-LMPC). The proposed framework clusters past trajectories into motion modes, constructs a mode-specific LMPC controller for each mode, and uses an LCB-based meta-controller to select which mode-specific controller to execute at each iteration. Mode information is incorporated into the terminal constraint and terminal cost through two designs. The hard-constrained design uses mode-specific terminal constraints and terminal costs constructed from the data associated with each mode. The soft-regularized design retains a shared terminal constraint while adding membership-based penalties to the terminal cost. These designs reduce the bias caused by pooling all trajectories into a single terminal memory while retaining the recursive feasibility and stability structure of LMPC. Our theoretical analysis shows that both designs preserve recursive feasibility and closed-loop stability. For the hard-constrained design, we further establish mode-wise cost convergence, asymptotic best-mode performance, and a logarithmic cumulative regret bound under the LCB rule. Simulations on multi-route obstacle-avoidance tasks show that MM-LMPC improves exploration and achieves lower costs than standard LMPC.