Papers

Quantum conference key agreement (QCKA) enables multiple spatially separated users to establish a common key with composable information-theoretic security by exploiting multipartite quantum correlations. Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states are a natural resource for this task, but their distribution over optical fiber is degraded by transmission loss, polarization decoherence, and detector imperfections. We investigate the finite-key performance of an $N$-party GHZ-based QCKA system using the $N$-BB84 protocol, where each optical link is modeled by extending the bipartite erasure–Pauli channel to incorporate detector dark counts. We characterize the impact of this quantum channel on the shared GHZ state and derive closed-form expressions for the error rates. The analytical results reveal that the local bit-error rate depends only on transmissivity and dark counts, while the global phase-error rate compounds over all $N-1$ links and therefore degrades faster with both distance and the number of parties. These error rates are integrated into a finite-key secret-key-rate (SKR) framework, in which we optimize the parameter-estimation probability via Brent's derivative-free method. Numerical results show that increasing fiber distance and network size reduce the achievable SKR. Furthermore, the optimized parameter-estimation probability consistently increases the SKR and extends the maximum secure distance relative to a fixed-allocation baseline, with comparison to the asymptotic limit quantifying the residual finite-key penalty.

A Constant Distance Gap (CDG) spacing controller for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) designed to increase the capacity of oversaturated signalized intersections is presented. In a departing platoon of production passenger vehicles, the controller maintains close inter-vehicle distances below 3 m within limited platoon lengths, using one-vehicle-look-ahead (OVLA) communication only. Extensive real-world experiments on heterogeneous, retrofitted legacy production cars demonstrate robust operation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of such close distances under this combination of conditions. A CDG policy can substantially increase discharge rates at oversaturated signalized intersections when vehicles preserve their standstill spacing during startup, as shown in our previous simulation study. Because this benefit unfolds only at high penetration rates, it calls for retrofit-capable solutions deployable in existing combustion-dominated fleets. However, practical realization in such fleets remains an open challenge. The proposed MPC-based controller combines a first-order longitudinal prediction model with precise powertrain feedforward employing OEM-specific torque models, without exchanging confidential vehicle parameters. It avoids explicit platoon coordination to minimize air-interface load in dense traffic. To mitigate disturbance amplification and increase feasible platoon length at very small gaps, two controlled spacing-relaxation strategies are compared: (i) a micro-time-gap policy near the theoretical string-stability bound, and (ii) an acceleration-dependent spacing relaxation based on a virtual mass-spring-damper model. We introduce the Desired Acceleration Overshoot (DAO), a time-domain metric relating local actuator-demand amplification to achievable platoon length.

Purpose: To develop and evaluate an integrated acquisition and reconstruction framework for distortion-free, high-resolution prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Methods: PROPELLER-DWI combines pulsed-gradient spin-echo diffusion preparation, an interleaved gradient-and-spin-echo PROPELLER acquisition with golden-angle blade rotation, and self-supervised joint reconstruction and denoising. It was compared with conventional NUFFT reconstruction and MPPCA denoising in a NIST/QIBA diffusion phantom, 25 volunteers, and 4 clinical patients undergoing 3T prostate MRI across three spatial-resolution settings and two b-values (50 and 1000 s/mm2). Reader studies compared geometric fidelity, image quality, and overall preference with clinical single-shot EPI-DWI. Results: PROPELLER-DWI preserved prostate geometry in cases where EPI-DWI showed susceptibility-induced distortion, signal loss, and metal-related artifacts. Self-supervised reconstruction improved noise suppression, with the greatest benefit at higher spatial resolution. Across all resolutions, PROPELLER-DWI had significantly higher geometric fidelity than EPI-DWI, and radiologist preference increased with the severity of EPI distortion. ADC measurements remained consistent across resolutions and comparable to clinical EPI-DWI, whereas EPI-DWI ADC varied with increasing resolution. Retrospective reduced-shot reconstruction also supported shorter scan times. Conclusion: PROPELLER-DWI enables distortion-free, high-resolution prostate DWI while preserving quantitative diffusion measurements, providing a practical alternative for technically challenging prostate MRI and applications requiring improved geometric fidelity.

Energy efficiency (EE) optimization for cellular links often assumes Shannon-capacity transmission. The 3GPP New Radio (NR) physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH), however, delivers a transport block whose size is fixed by the modulation and coding scheme (MCS), the rank, and the resource allocation chosen by the scheduler. The transport block must also meet a target block error rate (BLER). In this paper, we optimize EE for the NR PDSCH with the standard transport block size as the throughput and the target BLER as the constraint. Exponential effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) mapping (EESM) turns the BLER constraint into a convex per-subcarrier power constraint. We derive a closed-form waterfilling-like power allocation and an EE-maximizing MCS selection rule. With a single calibration parameter per MCS, fitted offline over 3GPP tapped delay line C (TDL-C) channels, EESM predicts the BLER without per-realization link-level simulation. Numerical results show that a Shannon-capacity baseline overestimates the EE of equal-power transmission by 1.5 to 1.7 times at high SNR within the transmit power budget.

Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) construct implicit safe sets for nonlinear systems with bounded inputs using finite-horizon predictions under a backup controller. As in model predictive control, an invariant backup set serves as a terminal set that guarantees safe continuation beyond the prediction horizon. However, reaching a small terminal set may require long prediction horizons, increasing the cost of online prediction. In this paper, we introduce an online construction that builds a certified region from sets stored along backup trajectories while keeping the prediction horizon fixed. The method stores finite collections of balls and connects each newly certified collection to the backup set or to previously stored balls. We derive conditions that guarantee forward invariance of the union of these balls and the backup set under a fixed backup controller. These conditions also ensure that every stored state reaches the backup set in finite time. The resulting union serves as an enlarged terminal set, allowing safety to be certified with shorter prediction horizons. We formulate a feasible quadratic program for safe control and prove that safety is preserved as additional certified collections are stored online. Simulations on a quadrotor demonstrate safe task completion with a shorter prediction horizon than the standard bCBF.

The advanced operation of heat exchangers plays a critical role in the development of efficient and sustainable multivector energy systems. This paper proposes a hybrid physics-informed and data-driven framework for the analysis, identification, and regulation of transient heat transfer in counter-flow heat exchangers. A parameterized physical model combines classical heat-transfer relations with transport equations to capture convective propagation, transport-induced delays, and nonlinear effects associated with flow-rate variations. The heat-transfer coefficient is identified from experimental data, enabling the characterization of flow-dependent heat-transfer dynamics over a broad operating range. The identified model is then used to develop a hierarchical real-time control strategy. An inner loop regulates the volumetric flow rate using a high-order data-driven linear model, while an outer loop regulates the exchanged heat power using a machine-learning controller initially trained on the physical model and subsequently refined with experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate accurate reproduction of transient heat-transfer dynamics and effective heat-flow-rate regulation under varying thermal boundary conditions (identification fit above 94% in normalized root-mean-square error and total variation of the flow rate reduced by half compared to a proportional-integral controller). The proposed framework combines physical interpretability with data-driven adaptation for the analysis and real-time operation of dynamic heat-transfer systems.

The CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition is widely used for revealing the underlying patterns from multiway data (also referred to as a higher-order tensor). When the data is clipped or saturated, however, the linear CP model becomes unreliable. Several remedies exist such as treating the clipped entries as missing or imputation; however, both fall short in different scenarios. We propose a nonlinear CP model (NCP) for pattern discovery in this setting, extending ideas from nonlinear matrix decompositions to tensors, and solve it using a flexible ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers)-based framework that can accommodate a variety of nonlinearities. Using synthetic data with known factors and simulated metabolomics data where clipping arises from instrument detection limits, we demonstrate that NCP recovers the underlying factors more accurately than CP fitted to only the observed entries or threshold-imputed data.

Partnered human-humanoid interaction couples locomotion with continuous physical contact. A humanoid needs to coordinate with a person's motion while responding to interaction forces and maintaining stable and natural movement. We present CoDance, a framework for learning reactive and compliant human-humanoid interaction from video. We study partnered dancing as a challenging instantiation, where a humanoid coordinates its footsteps with a moving partner and maintains continuous two-hand contact. Given a single video of two human dancers, CoDance retargets their motions into a robot reference and a moving partner. We introduce a multi-link compliance augmentation that transforms the kinematic demonstration into force-aware training data by adapting the robot reference under structured forces at both hands. Policies trained on this data follow the observed partner while preserving the demonstrated locomotion style and responding compliantly to physical interaction. In simulation, the policies adapt their footsteps to changes in the partner and reproduce approximately 80% of the wrist displacement encoded by the augmented demonstrations. On a physical humanoid, CoDance enables sustained two-hand dancing with a human partner including repeated transitions between forward and backward motions.

Frozen speech foundation models (SFMs) make downstream adaptation efficient: the backbone can stay fixed while a task learns layer fusion and a lightweight classifier. Full adversarial fine-tuning is a standard route to robustness, but generating adversarial examples and updating the backbone for every task sacrifices that efficiency. We ask whether robustness can instead be learned before future tasks are known. For a frozen backbone and linear classifier, robustness can be understood through the interaction between representation stability and decision-boundary margin. This leads directly to our design: we stabilize representations across the hidden layers, rather than only the final layer, while preserving clean representations; after clean adaptation selects the layer mixture, we keep it fixed and enlarge only the classifier margin, without downstream adversarial examples. We evaluate Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, and WavLM Large on four tasks under adaptive 30 dB attacks. Across 12 backbone-task pairs, hierarchical robustification improves robust accuracy by 46.4 pp, while margin refinement adds 4.0 pp for 1.1 pp of clean accuracy. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/arefmousavi/hierarchical-robust-sfm.

Movable antennas (MAs) have emerged as a promising technology for enhancing wireless communication performance. However, in delay-sensitive systems, MA movement incurs non-negligible delay, which may degrade the service process for bursty traffic. This paper investigates a delay-outage problem in an MA-enhanced multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink system. Unlike existing studies that mainly focus on physical-layer performance optimization, a cross-layer framework is developed that accounts for the overall delay due to antenna movement, along with service interruptions and queue accumulation at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Considering the different timescales of antenna movement and packet-level queue evolution, we establish a two-timescale transmission protocol and a cross-layer queueing model with Markov-modulated bursty arrivals. A long-term transmit-power minimization problem is then formulated to jointly optimize the destination antenna positions and transmit beamforming under delay-outage and practical MA movement constraints. To tackle the probabilistic delay-outage constraints, a backlog martingale is constructed to derive a deterministic sufficient condition in terms of service rate, thereby transforming the probabilistic constraints into deterministic service rate requirements. An alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on a short-horizon approximation is further developed to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline schemes by effectively balancing the MAs' spatial reconfiguration capability and the temporal service loss.

Infrared image super-resolution is currently led by Mamba-based networks with 26 to 37 million parameters, which are difficult to deploy on the airborne and handheld platforms where thermal imaging is most needed. This paper presents TIRMamba, a network with 896K to 910K parameters for single-channel thermal imagery. A Thermal Prior Highway computes gradient, local-contrast and spectral cues once at the input and, through one adapter per residual group, modulates a weight-tied bidirectional state-space trunk and gates its dual-scale detail branch; a tri-path reconstruction adds the learned residual to a bicubic radiometric baseline. Because the standard benchmark provides only 265 infrared training images and evaluates fusion products on full images, we train with a replay strategy: grayscale DIV2K pre-training followed by fine-tuning on 64-pixel patches drawn with equal probability from the infrared and natural corpora. At scale factor 4, TIRMamba matches the strongest protocol-trained methods on both official test sets with 29 to 40 times fewer parameters and 2.8 to 9.4 times lower latency; at scale factor 2 it gives the highest SSIM on both. A variant with prior-conditioned selectivity, TIRMamba-Rad, corrects a 3 dB raw-thermal failure of an intermediate size-invariant design and gives the best results at scale factor 4 on raw-thermal, unmanned-aerial-vehicle and independent-sensor test sets. Code and trained models will be released at https://github.com/julian135707/TIRMamba upon acceptance.

We propose UltraM2M, a weakly-supervised speech enhancement algorithm building upon the recent unsupervised mixture-to-mixture (M2M) algorithm. M2M realizes unsupervised speech enhancement by training deep neural networks on a set of real-recorded noisy-reverberant multi-channel mixture signals to estimate target speech and non-target signals. The two estimated signals are penalized by a so-called mixture-constraint (MC) loss, which constrains them to reconstruct the observed mixture signals. Although shown to be effective, the mixture constraint may be too weak to enable sufficient noise reduction. To deal with this, UltraM2M extends M2M by further leveraging text transcripts of real-recorded mixtures to design an automatic speech recognition (ASR) loss to penalize the estimated speech signal. The ASR loss can be viewed as a form of weak supervision that could help unsupervised enhancement. Evaluation results on the CHiME-4 dataset show the effectiveness of UltraM2M.

Learning-based acoustic sound source localization and detection (SSLD) requires large labeled datasets covering diverse acoustic conditions. Since obtaining measured data is costly, training commonly uses simulated data, while practical devices must operate under real-world conditions. However, higher simulation complexity increases data-generation cost, and the complexity required for reliable generalization remains unclear. In practice, SSLD methods often rely on efficient geometrical acoustic simulation, typically the image-source method. This work investigates how geometrical acoustic simulation complexity affects the real-world performance of a common multi-source SSLD model. We train the model with simulators ranging from anechoic conditions to high-order image-source simulations, optionally including diffuse reverberation, array simulation, and randomized image-source positions, and evaluate them on three measurement-based test datasets. Results show that anechoic simulation is insufficient, while medium-complexity image-source simulations already provide strong real-world performance. Further increases in complexity yield only marginal gains, with the best performance obtained using the highest tested image-source order, array simulation, and randomized image-source positions. For this configuration, measured-domain performance approaches within-domain simulated performance, suggesting limited benefit from further increasing simulation complexity. These findings show how the complexity-performance trade-off can be exploited in future data-driven SSLD, and highlight image-source randomization as an efficient way to improve generalization.

As enterprise blockchains become increasingly interconnected, access control must extend beyond the boundaries of a single network. Existing approaches mainly focus on controlling access within one blockchain, while cross-chain interactions involve multiple networks that may follow different access-control policies and administrative rules. In this paper, we propose InterAcct, an end-to-end access-control framework for secure interactions across permissioned blockchain networks. To avoid exposing sensitive internal information, InterAcct converts outgoing requests into a consortium-level representation before they are shared with another network. When a response is returned, the framework securely maps it back to the original requester within the source consortium, preserving confidentiality throughout the interaction. Our experimental results show that InterAcct can enforce end-to-end access control for cross-chain request-response interactions with low additional overhead and can continue to operate effectively as the workload increases.

Large language models are increasingly used as integration layers above specialized tools, but a stronger component does not necessarily produce a stronger combined system. Across five diagnostic datasets (bearing vibration, process monitoring, semiconductor equipment), we study whether an LLM can reliably use external diagnostic information; paired repeat calls separate advice effects from output instability. In all five, conflicting external information overturned initially correct LLM judgments. Among the four datasets with direct integration comparisons, none showed a consistent advantage for implicit LLM integration over the stronger standalone source. On a Tennessee Eastman confirmation set whose protocol was fixed before evaluation, unaided accuracy was 64.67%, implicit LLM-specialist integration 77.43%, and the specialist alone 83.33%. Specialist information improved the LLM by 12.8 points (95% interval 9.7 to 15.9), yet the integrated output stayed 5.9 points below the specialist (95% interval -12.0 to -0.7). A two-source selector oracle reached 92.76%, indicating complementarity that the integrated output did not fully realize. The integrated output missed 140 of 295 specialist corrections (47.5%) but lost 15 of 99 initially correct LLM judgments (15.2%). The deficit remained under prompt and specialist sensitivity analyses. Among CWRU cases solved under both evidence presentations, task-aligned physical evidence yielded lower estimates of susceptibility to incorrect advice in six of seven models (five intervals excluding zero); higher reasoning effort gave no reliable reduction in five models, and a separate four-model TEP analysis gave no clear evidence that it resolves the integration problem. Source quality and integration quality should be evaluated separately: an integration layer should be compared with its stronger standalone component, not only with the unaided LLM.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has emerged as a key paradigm for unifying radar sensing and wireless communications within a shared hardware and spectral framework. In parallel, ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) has gained attention as a low-power solution for enabling passive connectivity by modulating and reflecting existing radio-frequency signals. Motivated by these developments, this paper investigates an integrated sensing and ambient backscatter communication (ISABC) framework in which a dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) transceiver jointly performs high-resolution target sensing and low-power tag detection in cluttered environments. Within this ISAC and AmBC setting, we develop a comprehensive system model that jointly captures the estimation of target and clutter parameters, including delay, Doppler shift, and complex reflectivity, together with the recovery of embedded AmBC tag symbols. The resulting DFRC signal model reveals strong coupling among direct-path reflections, clutter echoes, and passive backscatter signals, leading to a highly entangled estimation problem. To address this challenge, we propose a robust three-stage signal processing framework that sequentially estimates target and clutter parameters before detecting the AmBC tag message. This structured approach effectively disentangles the superimposed components, improving both sensing accuracy and communication reliability in ISAC systems. Extensive simulations, benchmarked against the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB), demonstrate the superior estimation performance of the proposed DFRC-based solution. The results further highlight the fundamental trade-offs between sensing accuracy and backscatter communication efficiency in ISABC systems.

For a battery-powered UAV base station, every gram and watt devoted to RAN-compute competes with flight-duration margin. We therefore keep the 5G Core (5GC) and central unit (CU) on the ground and design the airborne unit around only the backhaul endpoint, distributed unit (DU), and radio. The key question is then a practical one: can widely available commodity ARM computers sustain a real radio OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G DU with useful performance over heterogeneous F1? We answer it with Raspberry Pi~5 and Jetson Orin Nano as DUs, a USRP B210, a commercial handset, and Ethernet, Wi-Fi/GRE, and 5G/WireGuard backhaul. Jetson preserves 88.4% of x86 split-DU Ethernet DL throughput and 87.5-89.0% across all three bearers; 5G/WireGuard preserves 76.4-77.1% of each host's wired DL rate. The validated Jetson/B210/RM500Q-GL electronics weigh 657.4 g and draw about 28 W under sustained traffic (757.4 g with integration allowance). A controlled link adaptation intervention raises split DL from 23.4 to 99.4 Mb/s as the dominant Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) moves from 3 to 26. Finally, synchronized radio, F1-U, CPU, and UHD evidence narrows the remaining monolithic-split gap to split-path scheduling/timing behavior. Beyond performance, this capability serves the emergency-response use case that motivates the aerial cell: once deployed above an affected area, it can broadcast a PWS warning message. We release the OAI patch that carries the single-segment Write-Replace Warning over F1 from CU to DU, where SIB8 is scheduled to the handset. The public artifact makes the payload, performance, and emergency-broadcast baseline reproducible with laboratory-accessible hardware.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables unobtrusive, contactless electrocardiogram (ECG) reconstruction for cardiac monitoring. Time-frequency spectrograms preserve fine cardiac patterns but often require large backbones to separate ECG-relevant features from respiration, motion, multipath, and subject-dependent interference. We propose Kapture, a parameter-efficient Koopman-governed framework that projects radar hidden states into a low-dimensional observable space and identifies a regularized full linear evolution operator from adjacent observable states. The Koopman-predicted observables refine subsequent hidden states for ECG reconstruction. To suppress predictable interference dynamics, a temporal contrastive objective pulls neighboring states together and separates non-neighbors, while reconstruction supervision preserves task relevance. Using approximately 80 minutes of quasi-static radar-ECG recordings containing realistic noise from body movements and other sources, Kapture consistently improves reconstruction across matched backbone widths, with the largest gains under aggressive compression. The compact configuration approaches the full-width reference accuracy with 68.1% fewer parameters and 91.3% fewer profiler-covered floating-point operations (FLOPs), while the full-width configuration delivers the strongest overall reconstruction performance. Our code will be made publicly available after potential publication.

Reinforcement learning controllers for underwater vehicles are usually trained against one physics representation and deployed against another, so reported performance does not always describe behavior outside training. This paper presents a pipeline-tracking architecture for a six-degree-of-freedom remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in which one Universal Scene Description (USD) scene supplies the real BlueROV2-Heavy mass, added-mass, damping, buoyancy, and thruster parameters to both halves of the system: a vectorized NumPy implementation of Fossen's marine-craft equations, and an interactive NVIDIA Isaac Sim deployment applying the identical equations as PhysX forces at every step. The Coriolis-centripetal term is the primary dynamics model in both branches; a controlled ablation on PPO and TRPO shows that including it does not destabilize either algorithm and modestly improves tracking, about 19 percent lower standoff RMS error for TRPO. Five reinforcement learning algorithms, PPO, soft actor-critic, TD3, DDPG, and TRPO, are trained against one environment, reward, and randomized evaluation harness through a checkpoint-compatibility layer scoring any policy with the same code. The pipeline is extended with six classical baselines, PID, sliding-mode, fuzzy logic, feedback linearization, model predictive control, and an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, driven by the same guidance geometry and thruster allocation as the learned policies. Under Coriolis-enabled dynamics, PPO, TRPO, and feedback linearization reach the strongest combination of 100 percent success and competitive accuracy; PID, fuzzy control, and the neuro-fuzzy baseline also reach 100 percent success with looser tracking; DDPG and TD3 each show a specific, explainable failure mode rather than a general weakness of off-policy learning; and classical control remains a strong baseline against the best learned policies.

Collision avoidance among convex bodies is a fundamental problem in robotics. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a practical framework for real-time safety filtering due to their computational efficiency. For general convex bodies, exact separation measures, such as distance or scaling factor, are typically computed through optimization. Existing CBF formulations often obtain the required gradient via differentiable optimization (diffOpt), adding computational overhead. In contrast, we leverage the Gilbert-Johnson-Keerthi (GJK) algorithm to obtain the current witness pair—the pair of points realizing the minimum distance or penetration depth—and formulate a CBF, termed GJK-CBF, whose gradient is constructed directly from the relative rigid-body motion of the witness pair, without resorting to diffOpt. This formulation applies to both 2D and 3D environments across a broad class of convex body pairs, provided that at least one in each one-to-one interaction is strictly convex. The proposed GJK-CBF is validated in various scenarios, including multi-robot position swapping in both 2D and 3D, navigation through a vertical slit in 3D, and its applicability to manipulators. The results demonstrate collision-free motion across all scenarios while reducing the conservativeness introduced by geometric approximations, particularly in narrow environments.

This paper proposes a unified framework for robust data-driven model predictive control (MPC) with terminal ingredients for unknown linear time-invariant systems. Based on Willems' fundamental lemma, a single offline input-output trajectory is used as an implicit model, while online implementation only requires past input-output measurements. Bounded measurement noise is considered in both offline and online output data. The framework consists of an offline stage, where robust terminal ingredients are designed directly from noisy data, and an online stage, where these ingredients are incorporated into a one-step MPC scheme. Recursive feasibility of the proposed framework and practical exponential stability of the closed-loop system are established. Numerical results illustrate the performance tuning capability of the terminal set, with particularly pronounced benefits for short prediction horizons, and show that the proposed framework achieves performance comparable to data-driven MPC without terminal ingredients while requiring a reduced prediction horizon and less online computation.

Robotic controllers increasingly rely on analytical models, simulators, cost-query interfaces, and learned world models. However, physical deployment can deviate from nominal assumptions, and additional disturbances may arise even when the model itself is accurate. In control systems, disturbance observers (DOB) are widely used to estimate such unmeasured effects from nominal models and measured feedback. Classical DOB formulations are generally built around explicit plant models. This paper develops the sampling-based disturbance observer (SDOB), extending the DOB principle to a broader range of models, including simulators and learned world models, through state-rollout or cost-query interfaces. SDOB separates two observable channels: state-effect disturbances, for which the feedback state differs from its prediction, and cost disturbances, for which the same query state receives different costs as the perceived environment changes. Diverse simulation and real-robot experiments across traditional and learned models demonstrate the effectiveness of SDOB in compensating for sim-to-real mismatch and improving control performance.

This paper proposes a novel aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided secure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) architecture. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted RIS establishes virtual line-of-sight links to bypass blockages, serving legitimate users while sensing potential eavesdroppers. To ensure communication security and sensing reliability, we formulate an infinite-horizon dynamic control problem maximizing the long-term average system secrecy rate and minimizing UAV flight energy. This formulation jointly optimizes the UAV trajectory, active beamforming with artificial noise (AN) at the base station, and RIS phase shifts, subject to strict radar signal-to-noise ratio and UAV kinematic constraints. Due to the highly coupled non-convex variables, solving this problem directly is intractable. Therefore, we propose an online joint optimization framework based on model predictive control (MPC). Within each receding horizon, alternating optimization is employed to decouple the problem into three subproblems, efficiently solved via successive convex approximation and difference of convex programming. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our MPC-based algorithm significantly outperforms static baselines in secrecy rate, exhibiting superior online correction capability and robustness against environmental perturbations.

The transition toward decentralized digitalized and lowcarbon electricity systems is fundamentally changing the role of electricity consumers Traditionally passive endusers are increasingly expected to integrate distributed energy resources DERs and participate in energy management and demand response This paper examines consumer empowerment CE in electricity networks with a specific focus on small consumers connected to distribution networks The paper first discusses the technical economic and societal drivers underlying the growing need for CE including increasing DER penetration electrification of heating and transportation network congestion and flexibility requirements A comprehensive definition of CE is then proposed based on six elements active participation enhanced choice information and control automation and controllability selfsufficiency and resilience and energy communities with shared ownership The proposed CE definition is an explicit consideration of weakgrid where security of supply is not guaranteed To support consistent assessment across different electricity systems a framework for quantifying CE is developed based on the availability of technology and policy enablers and consumers ability to ensure security of supply The paper further reviews global experiences and implementation practices across different continents highlighting variations in technological readiness regulatory support and securityofsupply considerations Finally the expected outcomes and challenges of CE are discussed The expected outcomes of CE are improving affordability flexibility resilience market efficiency DER integration and decarbonization while its successful implementation requires overcoming barriers related to information access digital literacy affordability regulation interoperability privacy cybersecurity and consumer engagement

This paper studies privacy-preserving distributed optimization using gradient tracking with one communication-free local update between consecutive communication rounds. Since local computation alone does not protect gradient information, we perturb both the primal state and the gradient-tracking direction at communication iterations while keeping local updates noise-free. We establish an aggregate variable for tracking, characterize the limiting consensus point in the presence of added random noise, and prove convergence in mean under certain parameter conditions. We also establish infinite-horizon pure differential privacy for the complete communication transcript under an affine objective adjacency relation and geometrically decaying Laplace perturbations. Simulation results illustrate the advantages of the proposed method in terms of the convergence and optimization accuracy given a privacy budget.

Adaptive control is usually developed through Lyapunov stability, excitation, and parameter convergence, whereas neighboring fields describe learning using convexity, information geometry, variational principles, and stochastic thermodynamics. This paper develops a constrained common language for these viewpoints. For linearly parameterized models, the excitation Gramian is simultaneously the Hessian of accumulated prediction loss and, under Gaussian observations, Fisher information up to scaling. Persistent, finite, and partial excitation become uniform, finite-horizon, and restricted temporal curvature; memory methods retain previously acquired curvature. On a closed convex parameter set, deterministic adaptation is a projected gradient/Onsager flow, with tangent and normal cones recovering projection, while composite learning supplies data-dependent symmetric dissipation. Reflected Langevin dynamics, no-flux Fokker–Planck evolution, and constrained free-energy flow provide the stochastic counterpart. The framework distinguishes information supplied by data from confinement supplied by regularization or hard constraints and connects familiar adaptive-control structures to modern variational and information-theoretic language.

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are transforming chemical and materials discovery through closed-loop automation, yet automated infrastructure for physical manipulation of soft, deformable matter remains beyond current robotic platforms. A critical instance is autonomous droplet transport on an open surface, where contact-angle hysteresis, capillary pinning, and surface heterogeneity produce partially observable dynamics that pose significant challenges for classical model-based controllers. We introduce the first robotic platform for closed-loop autonomous liquid droplet navigation on an open, unconfined surface using model-based reinforcement learning. A two-axis tilting board coated with a thin silicone oil film drives the droplet, while an overhead camera provides real-time feedback. A learned policy was trained on just 50 to 150 physical episodes depending on geometric complexity, without simulation or analytical models. Beyond performance alone, the platform demonstrates three capabilities of interest to the SDL community: it robustly transfers zero-shot to unseen geometries; it autonomously discovers an oscillatory depinning strategy to free the droplet when it sticks; and it completes its full training pipeline in under 90 minutes. These results extend reinforcement-learning manipulation from rigid microrobots to deformable soft-matter systems for next-generation SDLs.

Musical-instrument recognition is a fundamental music information retrieval (MIR) task supporting transcription, source separation, and audio understanding. Despite significant algorithmic progress, there is still room for improvement in recognizing acoustically similar instruments, particularly in polyphonic mixtures. We examine the contribution of ultrasonic components, i.e., frequencies above the audible 0-20 kHz range. Although most of this content cannot be represented at conventional 44.1/48-kSPS sampling rates under the Nyquist criterion, it is available in high-quality 96-kSPS recordings. Using a 96-kSPS multitrack corpus covering 15 classes across performers, instruments, studios, and sessions, we compare full-band, low-pass, and ultrasonic-only inputs using classical machine-learning and deep-learning classifiers. Our results show that source-dependent ultrasonic extensions and broadband transients contain instrument-specific information that significantly improves isolated and polyphonic recognition and motivates wider-bandwidth studies of other MIR tasks.

Safety-critical Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulations based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) often require multiple tuning parameters and may become conservative or difficult to keep feasible, particularly for high-relative-degree constraints. To address these limitations, in this paper we draw inspiration from the recently introduced Taylor-Lagrange Control (TLC) method, and propose an MPC formulation based on a Taylor expansion with Lagrange remainder (MPC-TLR). To enable digital implementation, we develop a numerical approximation of the Lagrange remainder under zero-order-hold control. The resulting safety constraint includes a tunable margin to account for approximation errors and balance safety, feasibility, and conservativeness. Comparisons with MPC using high-order CBFs (MPC-HOCBF), discrete-time high-order CBFs (MPC-DHOCBF), and direct safety constraints (MPC-DC) on a unicycle obstacle-avoidance problem show that MPC-TLR yields safer trajectories than MPC-DHOCBF and MPC-DC, while requiring fewer tuning parameters and being less conservative than MPC-HOCBF. Its broader control-input coverage under the adopted discretization can improve feasibility and control performance for short prediction horizons.

Landing on small celestial bodies is challenging because the spacecraft must satisfy safety and actuator constraints despite gravitational forces that are difficult to model accurately. This article presents an optimal control for safe landing with gravitational uncertainty and strict actuator limits. The approach addresses spacecraft pose control with attitude represented on SO(3), where there are actuator constraints and state constraints on position, attitude, velocity, and angular velocity. The approach combines several key techniques. First, the gravitational force uncertainty is estimated using an extended high-gain observer, and we present a new dynamic upper bound on the estimation error. This gravitational estimate and dynamic bound are then used to compute optimal control forces and torques that satisfy state and actuator constraints while tracking a landing trajectory. Optimal forces and torques are obtained from the closed-form solution to a quadratic program that has a single control barrier function constraint constructed by composing multiple control barrier functions that are designed to enforce each state and actuator constraint. Finally, an optimal allocation maps control forces and torques to actuator commands that satisfy actuator constraints. The method is demonstrated in simulation using 2 vehicle configurations with severe gravitational uncertainty.