Papers

This note establishes a geometric foundation for trajectory-manifold representations of deterministic nonlinear systems in a behavioral setting motivated by data-enabled predictive control. For a discrete-time system $x_{k+1}=f(x_k,u_k)$ with measured state and a $C^r$ transition map, $r\geq 1$, we consider the terminal-state-augmented finite-horizon behavior consisting of all admissible state-input trajectories over a prediction horizon $N$. We prove that this behavior is a $C^r$ embedded submanifold of the ambient trajectory space with intrinsic dimension $n+Nm$, where $n$ and $m$ are the state and input dimensions. Moreover, the rollout map from the admissible initial-state and input coordinates $(x_0,\mathbf u)$ is a $C^r$ diffeomorphism onto the behavior manifold, providing explicit global smooth coordinates. This yields a canonical exact encoder–decoder representation and implies that any exact differentiable latent representation of the full behavior must have latent dimension at least $n+Nm$. The geometric result does not require controllability, stabilizability, or invertibility of the dynamics. Corresponding results are given for zero-order-hold sampled continuous-time systems and fixed-step numerical transition maps. These results provide the deterministic geometric foundation for subsequent data-driven approximation and predictive-control development.

This paper establishes the necessary and sufficient conditions for asymptotic stability of the time-varying Kalman filter applied to a linear time invariant system with semidefinite initial state covariance and positive definite process and measurement noise. Rather than analyze the discrete Riccati equation as in the classic literature, the equivalent state smoothing optimization problem is stated and all results are established using properties of this optimization problem. A Lyapunov-like function, termed a modified $Q$-function is derived and used for this analysis. This optimization approach removes the need for the classic but cumbersome Riccati iteration algebra and provides better generalization and application for nonlinear systems.

As data center (DC) loads increasingly penetrate the power grid, there is an urgent need for grid operators to provide clear dynamic specifications to DC owners to ensure safe grid operation. To this end, we study two salient behaviors of large language model (LLM) training loads: abrupt ramps at job initiation and termination, which induce transient frequency excursions, and sustained periodic oscillations during training, which result in oscillatory steady-state behavior. For ramping loads, we show that nodal rotor frequencies can be accurately approximated by the center-of-inertia (COI) frequency and derive analytical expressions for its nadir and rate of change of frequency (RoCoF). These expressions determine allowable combinations of ramp times and steady-state load demands satisfying prescribed frequency limits. For oscillatory loads, we derive spectral specifications on their Fourier coefficients and show that the admissible coefficient set can be approximated by a polytope. We further obtain a compact representation via its maximum-volume inscribed ellipsoid, which we show is axis-aligned. Numerical tests on the WECC 179-bus system demonstrate that the resulting specifications remain valid for higher-order nonlinear dynamics. The proposed framework provides actionable specifications for regulating the dynamic behavior of large DC loads and informing load-shaping mechanisms within the data center ecosystem.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now routinely trained using synthetic data, since high-quality human data has been exhausted by the ever increasing needs of larger and larger models. However, recursive training on synthetic data frequently induces model collapse, a degenerative feedback loop where models progressively forget the true underlying data distribution. Training on a mixture of synthetic and fresh human data is a logical countermeasure and can prevent model collapse. However, it is an open question as to what is the exact minimum required ratio of human-to-synthetic data to maintain training stability. In this paper, we establish rigorous theoretical guarantees on the minimum rate of human data required to prevent model collapse. Although previous work established a formal lower bound for this ratio, such bound can be vacuous for very high dimensions, as the analysis relies on the usual Euclidean metric in R^n and is not adapted to the space of categorical probability distributions. Instead, in this paper we explicitly leverage the information-geometric structure of the probability simplex by analyzing the dynamics of the process under the Fisher-Rao metric. We derive quantitative contraction and invariance bounds that are stable and do not become trivial as the dimensions increase. Thus, we show that the effective required data ratio to prevent model collapse is different than previously implied.

This paper addresses the problem of designing time-optimal control profiles for point-to-point control of a gantry crane moving in a two dimensional plane. It is assumed that the hoisting motor completes the hoisting maneuver at a constant rate and completes its transition in the same time that it takes for the cart to reach its terminal position. This results in a linear time-varying model and a closed form solution to the time-optimal control problem is shown to be parameterized with Bessel functions. A comprehensive analysis of the structure of the time-optimal control profile is studied by examining the switching function which illustrates the mechanism of introduction and decimation of switches in the bang-off-bang control profile. The variation of the number of switches in the optimal control profile is presented and a non-intuitive control profile structure is noted, one which initiates with a stationary cart, while the hoisting cable length is changed prior to the initiation of motion of the cart. To address the issue of uncertainties in the initial cable length, a model with the sensitivity of the system states with respect to the initial cable length is used to augment the system model and is used for the design of robust time-optimal controllers. Experimental results validate the time-optimal and robust time-optimal control profiles.

Region-of-attraction (ROA) certificates for polynomial systems become expensive as state dimension and degree grow: direct sum-of-squares (SOS) formulations require combinatorially growing monomial bases. Quadratization represents a polynomial vector field exactly on an invariant manifold of a quadratic system, allowing a quadratic Lyapunov function to certify the ROA. For a fixed lift, stabilizer gains shape the off-manifold extension and transverse dynamics, while representation gauges change the matrix representation but not the vector field. Both affect the spectral-norm certificate, yet prior work fixes the gain by a feasibility heuristic before optimizing the gauge. We formulate optimal dissipative quadratization (ODQ), jointly designing gains and gauges for a fixed monomial lift, reference extension, stabilizer factorization, and Lyapunov weight $Q=I$. Gains lie in a prescribed compact Hurwitz box. At each gain, an exact semidefinite program globally minimizes the spectral-norm bound over the gauge. Residual-aware bounds yield a certified closed Lyapunov sublevel set, accounting for the floating-point Lyapunov residual. Under our stated assumptions, every accumulation point of the idealized outer search is box-Clarke stationary. A finite run returns the best independently verified candidate; global optimality of the gain search is not claimed. On a planar quintic, optimizing the gain increases the certified area by a factor of $2.238$ over a matched zero-gain gauge. Across 16 heterogeneous polynomial systems with stabilizer freedom, ODQ improves on both fixed-gain lifted baselines. All 36 ODQ runs on the relay benchmark complete, and all 27 repeat-level comparisons across nine fully paired cases favor ODQ over an SOS baseline with a fixed quadratic Lyapunov function in both the fixed-direction proxy and construction time. Broader comparisons with direct SOS methods remain mixed.

Two-stage stochastic Mixed-Integer Linear Programs are a canonical modeling tool to optimize power system operations under uncertainty, yet their extensive-form counterparts scale linearly with the number of scenarios and quickly become computationally prohibitive under day-ahead time constraints. We propose an Input Convex Neural Network architecture to learn a convex surrogate of the second-stage value function, enabling fast first-stage optimization while preserving convexity by construction. We couple the surrogate with a Neural-Benders correction loop that refines the first-stage solution a posteriori, recovering the exact optimum whether the network overestimates or underestimates the recourse cost, and certifying solution quality independently of surrogate accuracy. We evaluate the method on IEEE Stochastic Unit Commitment benchmarks (case9-case118) under both continuous and integer recourse. The proposed approach achieves solutions with zero optimality gap on the $K$-scenario instance across all test cases and scenario dimensions $K \in \{10, 50, 100\}$, with speedups up to $214\times$ over the Extensive Form in the integer setting. Solve times are stable across scenario realizations and compatible with day-ahead time windows on the tested benchmark instances.

The O-RAN control plane is becoming agentic: autonomous AI agents, deployed as rApps by different vendors, independently close control loops over shared radio resources. We demonstrate on a live O-RAN system that this independence is unsafe. Two agents with individually correct objectives, one protecting a latency SLA and one maximizing utilization for energy efficiency, jointly drive recurring opposing excursions of the shared resource partition that neither produces alone. Existing conflict-mitigation mechanisms presume a statically known application population and cannot govern agents whose behavior emerges at run time. We present AURA, a lightweight arbitration layer that admits agent actions only when they satisfy feasibility invariants, per-variable dwell times, and a deadband, and we prove the arbitrated system converges to a feasible operating point. Implemented on an OpenAirInterface (OAI) testbed with measured one-way latency and throughput, AURA reduces recurring shared-state excursions by more than an order of magnitude (from 8.4 to 0.4 PRB amplitude) and virtually eliminates cross-slice throughput starvation (from 40-55% to 0.3%), while leaving the protected slice's own latency compliance unchanged, a trade-off the convergence guarantee makes explicit.

Compact acoustic models face a challenging quality-capacity trade-off. We investigate two factors in this regime: encoder context and Mel-spectrogram supervision. A receptive-field-scaling study shows that expanding self-attention beyond 15 phonemes provides no consistent gains in pitch, energy, or duration prediction. Guided by this finding, we introduce a fixed-receptive-field convolutional encoder that reduces the respective prediction errors by 36.0%, 17.3%, and 3.4%. We further show that directly transferring image-domain gradient-variance supervision restores fine-scale variation but degrades predicted quality, motivating a Mel-specific formulation with axis-specific gradients, overlapping local statistics, and log-domain variance matching. GrainSpeech contains only 264.8K parameters and achieves 17.9x real-time Mel generation on a microcontroller (MCU), while attaining UTMOS scores comparable to substantially larger models with less than 1.5% of their parameters. Source code and demos are available at https://github.com/lab-emi/GrainSpeech.

A central challenge across control and learning is the design of mechanisms regulating the interactions between humans and autonomous agents. Inspired by the free energy principle from computational neuroscience, we introduce a control-theoretical framework to integrate human preferences online into an agent policy. We turn the framework into an open control architecture and validate our approach using a human-in-the-loop experimental testbed involving a rover navigating via onboard sensing. The human, remotely located and equipped with virtual reality headsets, shares the same sensory information as the rover. Human preferences are provided to the rover via gestures which introduce both cooperative and competitive interactions between the agent goal and the preferences. The experiments show that interactions are regulated, validating the proposed approach.

The rapid proliferation of grid-edge distributed energy resources has significantly increased the operational complexity of modern power systems. Consequently, conventional computational techniques face growing scalability and computational-efficiency challenges in addressing large-scale optimization and control, uncertainty management, nonlinear dynamics, and combinatorial decision-making in smart grid operations. Quantum computing has therefore emerged as a promising computational paradigm that can complement classical methods in addressing selected computationally intensive problems. In this context, this paper presents a comprehensive structured review of quantum computing applications in smart grid operations. Following a transparent keyword-based literature search, the paper classifies and assesses existing studies across monitoring and estimation, system planning, operation and control, security, reliability and resilience, stability assessment, data-driven intelligence, and digital twin technologies. The paper also describes fundamental quantum-computing concepts and key algorithms, highlighting their relevance for power system applications. Furthermore, it reviews the current state of quantum hardware, software frameworks, simulators, cloud services, and emerging hardware-agnostic ecosystems that support cross-platform application development and deployment. The reviewed studies are examined by implementation environment, benchmarking practices, application scale, and evidence of computational advantage. Finally, the principal challenges associated with practical implementation are discussed, and future research directions are outlined. This paper provides a consolidated and evidence-calibrated perspective on the current state and future potential of quantum computing for next-generation smart grid operations.

Near-field propagation between finite apertures can support multiple spatial channels, while far-field transmission is effectively single mode and follows the Friis transmission formula. This letter establishes a direct connection between these two regimes through the mutual shadow area between the transmitting and receiving apertures. The mutual shadow determines the asymptotic number of spatial degrees of freedom and, in the paraxial regime, leads to a simple beamforming distance that provides a characteristic scale for the transition from multimode to effectively single-mode propagation. The channel singular-value sum rule further shows that, below this distance, increasing separation primarily reduces the number of supported spatial channels while their average normalized strength remains approximately constant. Beyond the transition, the remaining channel strength decreases according to the conventional free-space quadratic power law, recovering the Friis transmission formula. Numerical results for circular apertures demonstrate the transition, the scaling with aperture size, and the dependence on the transmitter and receiver apertures. The mutual-shadow formulation also extends the description beyond the paraxial regime.

Low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) data is a core challenge of online Data-Driven Predictive Control (DPC) for linear, time-varying systems. This paper proposes a Bayesian, online DPC framework based on autoregressive models with exogenous inputs (ARX) that uses an externally-provided prior, which encodes inductive bias such as smooth system dynamics and stability, to safeguard performance when SNR is low. The posterior estimate of the ARX parameter is propagated forward in time using a Kalman filter with a state equation defined by an adaptation-rate hyperparameter, which is adjusted online to track the rate at which the underlying system dynamics evolve. The Kalman filter's posterior mean and covariance determine the DPC's Final Control Error cost function, which is the posterior expectation of the quadratic cost function. Critically, the Kalman filter's process equation is chosen so that, regardless of the hyperparameter adaptation, the prior distribution is invariant over time. Thus, while old data is forgotten, the prior is not. DPC tracking experiments on a time-varying second-order system demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

We demonstrate dual-modal distributed sensing on an operational 110-kV OPGW during crane maintenance. DAS resolves meter-scale lifting events and matches impulsive events to phone audio, while DTSS quantifies post-reclamping residual strain up to $\sim$398 $\mu\epsilon$, enabling maintenance verification and asset monitoring in transmission grids.

Generating signals on graphs requires permutation-equivariant models that exhibit stability with respect to relative structural perturbations. While recent graph-aware Schrödinger bridge models incorporate topology information directly into their reference dynamics, it is unclear how perturbations of the graph propagate through these dynamics and affect the resulting generated distributions. In this paper, we analyze the structural stability of graph-aware continuous-time generative models whose drift combines a graph filter with a learned graph neural network. We derive explicit Wasserstein stability bounds that quantify the effect of relative graph perturbations on the generated distributions. Motivated by these bounds, we introduce a principled framework for designing stable graph filters that preserve the smoothing behavior of graph heat diffusion, while boosting structural stability. Experiments on synthetic and fMRI signals show our stable filters enhance structural robustness while matching or exceeding the generative quality of the heat equation baseline.

Speech Enhancement (SE) supports listening, particularly for older adults with age-related hearing loss. Yet, enhanced Speech Quality (SQ) is commonly evaluated by young normal-hearing listeners, and how their ratings translate to older adults remains under-explored. We compared absolute SQ ratings from 40 younger normal-hearing listeners (20-30 years) and 67 older listeners (60-95 years) with diverse audiometric profiles, after screening. Test materials comprised natural dialogues with realistic backgrounds. SQ differences between SE systems that were clear for younger listeners were smaller or inseparable in older groups, regardless of hearing status. Hearing loss severity was associated with lower absolute ratings, but did not strongly modulate the contraction in separable SQ differences. A small, audiometrically mixed subgroup of older listeners showed younger-like rating patterns, suggesting that peripheral audiology alone cannot explain the contraction.

In interactions with uncertain opponents, dual model predictive control (MPC) can improve performance through information-seeking actions that reduce uncertainty about opponents' behavior. Its recent applications to autonomous driving, however, are limited to scenarios involving a single opponent on a single lane. This paper presents a mixed-integer dual MPC for multiple reactive opponents on multi-lane roads, jointly optimizing integer-valued maneuver decisions (lane changes and safe-region selections), and continuous motion over a scenario tree that samples plausible interactions with the opponents. As interaction complexity increases, solving the resulting mixed-integer nonlinear program becomes increasingly expensive. To reduce this computational burden, a graph neural network (GNN) predicts the optimal maneuver decisions, and high-confidence predictions are fixed before the reduced problem is solved. Simulations show that active probing behavior emerges in complex interactive scenarios, and that GNN guidance fixes $76.3\%$ of the integer decisions and reduces the solve time by $2.5\times$ on average, with negligible degradation of optimality.

The main contribution of this work is to identify model parameters for an Anion Exchange Membrane (AEM) system directly from measured operational data, enabling their use in power system studies. Due to the relatively low technology readiness level (TRL) of AEM electrolysers, only limited literature reports operational parameters supported by openly available experimental data. By capturing the realistic dynamic behaviour and power consumption of the AEM electrolyser, this model allows for more accurate evaluation of system topologies and control strategies for green hydrogen production. This paper presents a model of an AEM electrolyser based on experimental data from Enapter modules installed in the Power-to-X (PtX) Laboratory at the Technical University of Denmark [1]. The model comprises a polarisation curve and a model of current dynamics during operation. It is validated against operational data and can be applied in grid-balancing studies as well as in assessments of how electrolyser dynamics influence the power system. The results suggest that the AEM technology is suitable for services such as smoothing wind farm power output and provide system services to support frequency balancing. The findings highlight the importance of considering the constraints of the process when designing for flexible load operation, and consideration of the interaction between the power control and process control systems.

Differential embedding methods aim to reconstruct attractors of dynamical systems from noisy measured time series, but require accurate estimates of signal derivatives. We introduce SHADED (Savitzky-Golay and Homogeneous-differentiator based Automatic DEnoising and Differentiation), a novel methodology for denoising and estimation of derivatives up to an arbitrary order, which enables attractor reconstruction via differential embedding from noisy time series data. Homogeneous Differentiators (HD) guarantee finite-time derivative estimates in the presence of noise, while subsequent Savitzky-Golay (SG) filtering attenuates chattering. Crucially, SHADED extracts all parameters required for application of both HD and SG automatically from the data, without requiring manual tuning that may lead to inaccurate reconstruction, and can also incorporate prior knowledge, if available, thereby yielding a flexible tool for data-driven numerical differentiation of noisy signals. The obtained differential embeddings can reveal features of the underlying dynamics that are useful, e.g., for system identification, pattern recognition and discrimination between dynamic regimes; the latter application is particularly important in biomedical settings, to help distinguish between different physiological and pathological states. We demonstrate the efficacy of SHADED by testing it on computational neuroscience models, LTspice-simulated chaotic electronic circuits, and photoplethysmography and arterial blood pressure experimental recordings: across all these case studies, SHADED produces accurate derivative estimates and accurate attractor reconstructions via differential embedding (whenever a ground truth is available) or geometrically coherent and reproducible reconstructions consistent with the expected dynamics (in the absence of a ground truth), without the need for manual parameter tuning.

Subspace methods such as multiple signal classification (MUSIC) achieve super-resolution direction of arrival (DoA) estimation by exploiting the orthogonality between the array manifold and the noise subspace of the measurements. Their accuracy therefore depends on the assumed manifold and degrades under model mismatch, while parameters not identifiable from the spatial manifold cannot be recovered. In this work, we propose the conditional neural manifold (CNM), which replaces the fixed manifold with an observation-conditioned mapping from source parameters to steering vectors. An encoder maps the snapshots to a latent scene representation that conditions a zero-initialized neural field over the parameter space. The manifold is learned without steering-vector supervision by shaping the resulting MUSIC landscape. Since the correction acts on the manifold rather than on the estimator, it can be used by other manifold-based methods without modification. The CNM restores resolution under array imperfections, colored noise, correlated sources, and near-field propagation, and resolves the angle-frequency ambiguity inherent to the nominal spatial manifold.

MPnRAGE enables multiple inversion contrast images in a single scan, allowing quantitative T1 mapping, tissue nulled contrasts, and standard MPRAGE synthesis. However, current 3D scan times remain clinically impractical, motivating accelerated 3D MPnRAGE. This work provides a highly accelerated Cartesian 3D MPnRAGE sequence with joint implicit neural representation (INR) reconstruction. The sequence uses a tailored view-ordering strategy, flip angle schedule and complementary variable-density Poisson-disk undersampling. Calibration data acquired during otherwise unused delay time are used for sensitivity map estimation and complementary high-frequency sampling. Ten INR-reconstructed inversion images at 1.5 mm$^3$ are evaluated against fully sampled references via retrospective undersampling. Prospectively accelerated 1 mm$^3$ images at R = 20 (5.39 min) demonstrate clinical feasibility. INR reconstruction outperforms subspace and iterative local low rank reconstruction on highly accelerated data. The proposed highly undersampled 3D Cartesian MPnRAGE with INR reconstruction generates multiple high-quality inversion contrasts in substantially reduced scan time. Scan-specific INR reconstruction improves image quality while reducing reconstruction time versus state-of-the-art methods.

Text-to-music (TTM) systems are increasingly used to generate musical audio from natural-language descriptions. Robust evaluation is therefore essential, yet reliable performance comparison remains challenging. This difficulty stems from differences in system architecture, supported conditioning information, and access mode, as well as heterogeneous and fragmented metrics that cannot be applied uniformly across systems. To address these challenges, we introduce TTM-Bench, a framework that defines a common protocol for systematic, reproducible performance benchmarking of contemporary TTM systems. It evaluates performance along two dimensions: musical-content alignment, quantified by interpretable semantic, genre, and musical-descriptor agreement scores against a common musical specification and summarized by an aggregate score; and computational efficiency, characterized by generation latency and real-time factor, alongside resource use for local models and cost for hosted services. We demonstrate the framework through a preliminary comparative case study, illustrating the complementary evidence captured by these dimensions. The results show that higher musical-content alignment does not systematically coincide with lower computational demands, highlighting the importance of assessing TTM performance through distinct, interpretable measures rather than a reductive overall indicator.

Quantum computers can potentially solve large-scale combinatorial problems very efficiently when the problems are first converted into the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) format. Scheduling in fifth generation (5G) base stations is a practical combinatorial problem that cannot be solved optimally in real-time using classical computing. We formulate the downlink (DL) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheduling at 5G base stations as QUBO and analyze the QUBO formulation scalability with respect to the key system parameters. The single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) QUBO formulation looks promising because the number of QUBO variables grows linearly while the problem search space grows exponentially with increasing number of users. Based on the simulation results, the suboptimal greedy algorithm for the SU-MIMO performs well with a high number of users and low bandwidth. A hybrid approach, where either a quantum solver or a suboptimal low-complexity classical algorithm is selected based on the system parameters, seems sensible in practice. This work paves the way for future quantum and quantum-inspired implementations of scheduling in cellular systems.

Mask-based speech enhancement is widely used for suppressing noise and interference, but its performance in spatial audio algorithms with multichannel output has not been studied extensively. In such settings, speech enhancement must improve speech quality while preserving spatial cues that are essential for localization, spatial awareness, and spatial release from masking. In this work, we systematically compare time frequency masking applied to three signal representations: microphone signals, beamformer outputs, and Ambisonics signals. Performance is evaluated in terms of speech quality, intelligibility, binaural cue preservation, and reverberation preservation. Results reveal a clear trade-off between enhancement and spatial fidelity: beamformer-domain masking achieves the highest speech enhancement scores, while Ambisonics-domain masking better preserves the spatial attributes of the residual interference. All methods preserve the target's localization cues.

Speech retrieval has become increasingly important as spoken content continues to grow across meetings, lectures, podcasts, and videos. Existing benchmarks and models have advanced semantic search over spoken content, but largely focus on what is said while overlooking who says it. In many real-world scenarios, however, users need to retrieve speech based jointly on semantic content and a target speaker, where the speaker may be specified naturally through a reference speech utterance rather than a predefined identity. To address this gap, we introduce VoiceTrace-Bench, a benchmark for hybrid speech retrieval in which each query combines text specifying what to retrieve with reference speech specifying who to retrieve. This setting requires models to integrate complementary semantic and speaker information directly from heterogeneous query inputs. Motivated by the joint audio-text modeling capabilities of audio-language models (ALMs), we develop VoiceTrace, a two-stage retrieval framework consisting of VoiceTrace-Emb, an embedding model that learns unified representations for efficient large-scale retrieval, and VoiceTrace-Reranker, a reranking model that jointly examines each query–candidate pair for fine-grained relevance estimation. Experiments show that VoiceTrace achieves state-of-the-art performance on established semantic speech retrieval benchmarks, while substantially outperforming cascade-based approaches on VoiceTrace-Bench, demonstrating its effectiveness for both conventional semantic retrieval and the new hybrid retrieval setting.

In integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), the same spectral and hardware resources are shared for two functionalities. Most ISAC designs assume perfect target-angle information neglecting angle estimation errors, which introduce steering-vector mismatches, degrade sensing accuracy, and may invalidate deterministic sensing guarantees. This paper investigates monostatic massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) ISAC systems under imperfect target-angle estimates. We derive closed-form expressions for the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) of target azimuth and elevation estimates in the presence of angle uncertainty. We characterize the cumulative distribution functions and outage probabilities of the CRLBs under Gaussian, generalized uniform, and von Mises angle-error models. Our analysis reveals that, in the small-error regime, the CRLBs increase quadratically with the angle errors due to transmit steering-vector mismatch. To ensure reliable sensing, we propose a robust power allocation framework that jointly optimizes pilot training and communications/sensing transmission powers to maximize the communications sum rate while satisfying CRLB outage constraints. The resulting nonconvex problem is solved using an alternating-optimization algorithm based on successive convex approximation. Numerical results validate the developed analysis and show that the proposed robust design reduces azimuth and elevation CRLB outage probabilities by up to $60\%$ compared with conventional non-robust schemes. It attains up to $45\%$ higher sum rates than the non-robust design under strict CRLB thresholds.

This paper presents a bio-inspired antagonistic variable stiffness actuator (VSA) based on two crossed four-bar compliant transmission elastic units (CFB-CTEs). The design addresses the difficulty of combining nonlinear elastic shaping with low structural inertia in antagonistic VSA mechanisms. Inspired by the crossed constraint behavior of the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments during knee flexion, the proposed actuator uses geometric transmission, elastic energy storage, and bilateral antagonistic arrangement to shape the output torque and equivalent stiffness. A multi-objective optimization model is established to balance torque tracking accuracy, equivalent inertia, and mass. The selected compromise design achieved a torque root-mean-square error (RMSE) of $0.883~\mathrm{N\,mm}$ and a total mass of $50.2~\mathrm{g}$. Its average equivalent inertia was reduced by about 78% compared with an independent torque-only optimized design. An ADAMS multibody model was further built to verify the structural response under single-input, opposite-input, and same-input conditions. The results support the feasibility of the proposed crossed four-bar elastic unit as a lightweight nonlinear elastic branch for antagonistic VSAs.

Safe motion planning in automated driving requires anticipating evolving traffic risks and deciding when to revise the current planned trajectory. We introduce RiskWorld, a risk-aware world modeling framework for shared occupancy forecasting and selective trajectory replacement. Spatial risk fields and temporal actor context are fused with visual bird's-eye-view features. Flow-guided evolution transports occupancy and scene features, while signed residuals correct occupancy after transport. One forecast is generated per planning step and reused across candidates. Each candidate is compared with a current-state persistence reference, yielding a nonnegative collision-score correction. The trajectory selected by current-world evaluation serves as the planning anchor and is replaced only when additional predicted risk triggers intervention and an alternative satisfies component-wise constraints on predicted risk and trajectory error. Candidate geometries remain unchanged. We evaluate RiskWorld for open-loop planning on nuScenes using camera features, annotation-derived current and historical actor states, and dataset-provided map context. RiskWorld achieves the lowest collision rate at a long evaluation horizon of 3 s, and the second-best average L2 error among various state-of-the-art baselines, while running at 11.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 with 90.81 M parameters. Within-setting ablations show that RiskWorld achieves lower collision rates than the current-state rescoring baseline, while forecast reuse enables additional candidates to be evaluated at low marginal computational cost.

Stochastic subspace methods have gained popularity as gradient descent based techniques for large scale optimisation problems, especially in distributed settings. In this paper, we introduce the technique of "persistence of memory" to greatly extend and improve the random subspace methods. To this end, we leverage a vector that is only weakly correlated with the gradient in order to provide a guiding structure to the generative process of the random subspace along which the descent is going to take place. This guidance vector may be fixed for a large number of iterations, only to be refreshed at wide intervals (on whose size we can provide guarantees in terms of problem parameters). In important machine learning settings, such as optimisation problems embodying sparsity or a minibatch structure, we show that the guidance vector can be obtained in an effective and computationally inexpensive manner by leveraging the structured properties of the problem. En route, we establish to our knowledge the first theoretical analysis of classical SSD methods for sparse functions. In a local neighbourhood of the optimum, we demonstrate an alignment phenomenon of our gradient estimates with a low-lying eigenvector of the Hessian, allowing a once-for-all computation of the guidance vector which renders the method computationally favourable even in scenarios with unstructured objectives.

Computed tomography (CT) has been widely used in medical examinations and non-destructive testing. Micro-CT (microfocus X-ray CT system) is an advanced version that can observe the internal structures of small objects. However, secondary radiation can prevent micro-CT from imaging the full structure of the object. Given the same amount of secondary scans as primary scans, simple subtraction solves the problem at the price of doubled acquisition time. To reduce the acquisition time, one aims to limit the secondary scans to as few imaging angles as possible and interpolate to recover the missing data. Different interpolation methods have been explored for limited-angle tomography, such as polynomial or spline interpolation, compressive sensing, deep learning, etc. In contrast to many of these scenarios, the secondary imaging setup considered in this paper often exhibits simple sinusoidal structures that are not exploited directly by any of the aforementioned approaches. This paper aims to fill this gap with a continuous mathematical model describing the secondary sinogram only with information from the projection space. Building on this model, we propose an interpolation method that effectively interpolates secondary scans from limited observations.