Autonomous robots that interact with people must make safe and efficient decisions under human-induced uncertainty, such as their preferences, goals, competency, and willingness to cooperate. Safety filters are a popular approach for ensuring safety in interactive robotics, since their modular design separates safety from performance, allowing robots to operate safely around people with minimal impact on task efficiency. While traditional safety filters typically operate only in the physical space, neglecting the robot's ability to learn and adapt online, the recently proposed belief-space safety filter (BeliefSF) reasons about robot safety in closed-loop with runtime inference that actively reduces the robot's uncertainty online, thereby reducing conservativeness in filtering. However, providing formal safety guarantees for robots deploying BeliefSF remains a significant challenge due to errors in runtime inference and neural approximation of safety filters required to handle the high dimensionality of belief spaces. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach to certify high-probability safety of BeliefSF using conformal prediction, while explicitly accounting for the reliability of the robot's runtime inference module. Our method leverages the structure of belief-space safety filtering by focusing verification on a region where inference is expected to be reliable. It preserves the simplicity and sample complexity of standard conformal prediction, yet can certify a substantially less conservative safety filter. Through a simulated human-vehicle interaction benchmark, we show that our approach verifies a significantly more permissive belief-space safety filter than a standard conformal prediction baseline.

Incentive design studies how a central authority can influence strategic agents through payments, subsidies, or taxes, so that individual objectives align with collective welfare. This paper introduces a No-Regret Adaptive Incentive Design (RAID) framework for nonlinear games with continuous action spaces and private agent costs. In this framework, the authority (planner) designs incentives that regulate the Nash equilibrium toward a socially optimal action profile, while simultaneously learning agents' unknown preferences from repeated strategic responses. We formulate the RAID problem and construct a least-squares estimator whose strong consistency requires only diminishing excitation. Leveraging this weak excitation requirement, we propose a switching incentive policy that alternates between probing (exploration) and estimate-based (exploitation) incentives. The resulting policy achieves an $O(t^{-0.5})$ parameter estimation rate and accumulates $O(t^{0.5}\log t)$ squared social-cost regret, almost surely. We further extend the framework to an endogenous-noise response model, where standard least-squares estimation is biased due to an error-in-variables correlation between the noise and agent responses. We utilize a repeated-sampling estimator and corresponding switching policy that retain the same almost-sure convergence and regret rates. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness and predicted convergence rates of the method.

Publicly available phonocardiogram (PCG) datasets remain limited in size and pathological diversity, constraining both auscultation training and the generalisation of automated heart-sound classifiers. A class-conditional diffusion model for PCG generation is developed in the log-mel domain and synthetic fidelity is assessed using complementary (i) physiology-inspired plausibility metrics, (ii) downstream label-consistency evaluation, and (iii) expert listening. Experiments use the Phy-sioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2016 dataset (3240 recordings) with recording-level splits. After preprocessing and quality control, 16,749 non-overlapping 4 s clips are mapped to a normalised 1 x 128 x 128 log-mel representation to train a conditional 2D U-Net denoiser with classifier-free guidance. Signal-level plausibility is quantified on reconstructed waveforms using three lightweight metrics: an envelope-autocorrelation rhythm score, an amplitude-based explosion score, and the dominant cycle lag. Synthetic clips preserve similar dominant cycle durations but exhibit reduced envelope periodicity and increased transient burstiness relative to real clips. For downstream evaluation, a ResNet-50 classifier achieves 92.24% accuracy on the held-out real test set and 82.8% accuracy on class-balanced synthetic batches, indicating that generated signals retain discriminative structure relevant to normal/abnormal classification. In a pilot expert listening study (60 clips, two clinicians), most synthetic clips are judged as heart-sound-like, while abnormality sensitivity is low for both real and synthetic 4 s excerpts. Overall, the results provide a practical baseline for diffusion-based PCG generation while highlighting remaining challenges in retaining abnormal acoustic cues and reducing reconstruction-induced artefacts.

Microwave linear analog computers (MiLACs) offer a transformative paradigm for future multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by shifting complex signal processing into the analog domain, thereby significantly reducing computational complexity, radio-frequency chains, and analog-digital converters, while speeding up computation. However, the practical deployment of MiLACs is severely constrained by the inherent hardware losses of the tunable admittance components (TACs) interconnecting MiLAC ports, which introduce severe inter-stream interference and fundamentally limit the spectral efficiency (SE) of the system. In addition, while denser architectures offer greater spatial degrees of freedom to mitigate inter-stream interference, the cumulative hardware losses and power consumption of massive TACs severely degrade the system's energy efficiency (EE). Consequently, designing architectures for lossy MiLACs emerges as a critical yet unresolved challenge, as it necessitates striking a delicate tradeoff between interference suppression and cumulative hardware losses/power consumption. To address this challenge, this paper investigates the joint MiLAC architecture design and performance (SE/EE) maximization in lossy MiLAC-aided MIMO systems. We propose a novel learning-based joint architecture and performance optimization framework (LJAPOF) that unifies the design of MiLAC architectures and analog beamforming configurations for lossy MiLACs under both SE- and EE-oriented objectives. Numerical results demonstrate that by intelligently navigating the fundamental tradeoff between interference suppression and hardware/power consumption, the proposed LJAPOF can design optimal MiLAC architectures that consistently outperform stem-connected and fully-connected MiLACs in maximizing the system's SE and EE.

Packet networks are controlled dynamical systems with discontinuities, delayed observations, and partial state information. Adaptive or learning-driven proposers can improve performance, but an unsafe proposal may still cause starvation, tail-delay spikes, or unstable queue behaviour. This paper treats packet-network control as an executed-action certification problem. A certified operator sits between any proposer and the dataplane. At each control tick, the proposer emits an arbitrary candidate action $\tilde u(t)$. The operator either projects it to an executable action $u(t)$ that satisfies a configuration-compiled certificate, or reports INFEASIBLE and executes an always-defined fallback with quantified slack. The certificate also exports an auditable envelope $\bar z(t)$ for downstream composition. The guarantees are conditional and explicit. They apply on ticks where the operator reports CERTIFIED, the declared arrival envelope and backlog bound are valid, and the platform realises the assumed service lower bound. Under these conditions, one mechanism covers backlog caps, service floors, mitigation caps, Foster--Lyapunov drift constraints, and compositional envelope contracts. We prove operator-level safety, feed-forward compositional safety and stability using exported envelopes, and a cyclic closure result under a small-gain condition. We also define breach and infeasibility semantics, discuss calibration of the service-tracking factor that links certified targets to realised scheduler behaviour, and evaluate the design under delayed telemetry, delayed actuation, weak proposers, envelope mismatch, overload, and millisecond-scale certification. The present evaluation validates the certified execution boundary in a byte-level closed-loop backend; deployment-level scheduler tracking is left to future Linux or hardware experiments.

Speech denoising is an often necessary step not only for human listening, but also for downstream processing by systems lacking robustness to noisy, real-world acoustic conditions. Unfortunately, denoising is a problem where conventional in-domain supervised training is not trivial, as the training targets cannot be annotated by humans: producing a clean version of a naturally-noisy speech recording is itself the task to solve. Supervised training is typically performed through the artificial addition of noise to clean speech recordings, which can only be sourced from controlled domains, a significant limitation due to the poor out-of-domain generalization of neural networks. An alternative is noisy target training (NyTT), which simply replaces the clean speech with in-domain noisy recordings, with the hope that learning to remove the artificial noise will extend to the natural. Though having shown promising results, NyTT's training objective is not minimized by clean speech estimates. We show that by estimating the artificial noise in addition to the naturally-noisy speech, the undesirable optimum can actually be exploited: the residual noise in the speech estimate can be canceled by the noise estimate via simple subtraction. Crucially, the optimum is fully compatible with conventional artificial mixtures, enabling joint training using both types of data with consistent optimization targets, opening the door to improved domain adaptability. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through WHAM! and CHiME-3-based benchmarks.

Cell-free Massive multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) is recognized as a key technology for beyond-5G networks, where distributed access points (APs) jointly serve user equipments (UEs) to address the inherent inter-cell interference issue inherent in cellular systems. While conventional distributed signal detection methods offer a practical balance between performance and fronthaul load, they are fundamentally limited by linear processing constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based uplink detection framework by introducing the distributed mixture of experts detection network (DMoE-DetNet). In this architecture, each AP acts as a local expert employing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for non-linear feature extraction, and transmits the local minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection results and statistical channel information to the central processing unit (CPU). In the CPU, an attention-based encoder module captures complex spatio-temporal dependencies among users for global feature fusion, with a gating network at the central processor dynamically weighting the contributions from different APs. At last, a linear detector outputs the symbol probability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DMoE-DetNet significantly outperforms conventional linear processing based cell-free signal detection methods in terms of symbol error rate, showcasing the potential of artificial intelligence-enabled communication systems.

State-space models are traditionally based on physical knowledge, but multi-step predictions from these physical models can be poor due to model inaccuracy. Black-box deep learning has shown promise as an alternative. However, these methods rely on the availability of large datasets and potentially available physical knowledge is neglected. We propose the PG-RSSNN, a physics-guided recurrent state-space neural network that incorporates recurrent structures to enable the use of non-saturating activation functions in multi-step prediction. It mitigates the vanishing gradients and eliminates the risk of numerical divergence in training seen in existing structures that feed back state estimates. Results across multiple systems with various physical model imperfections, from linear state-space models with Gaussian noise to a robotic arm and a cascaded water tank system, show that the proposed PG-RSSNN maintains stable training behavior, and improves multi-step predictions, as compared with black-box neural networks and physics-only models, even with limited training data and when physical models are only partially known.

Clock asynchronism between base stations (BSs) and users significantly degrades scatterer localization accuracy. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-BS joint channel estimation and localization scheme that exploits shared scatterer information among multiple BSs. First, channel modeling in the location domain is performed by leveraging the joint sparsity of multi-BS channels. Subsequently, a multi-BS scatterer association algorithm is developed based solely on Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimates. By utilizing the shared scatterers and the geometric relationships among the scatterers, BSs, and the user equipment (UE), coarse estimates of the UE location and timing offsets are obtained. Based on these coarse estimates of scatterer locations, UE location, and timing offsets, an expectation-maximization (EM) framework is employed. Specifically, the UE location and timing offsets are iteratively refined while jointly enabling high-precision estimation of scatterer locations and channel coefficients. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significant improvements in both channel estimation and localization accuracy compared with baseline methods.

Robust state estimation is central to robotic autonomy, yet classical Kalman filters struggle with frequency-dependent disturbances and model mismatch such as sensor vibrations, electromagnetic interference, and periodic noise. Although Deep Kalman Filter (DKF) variants extend the Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF) framework by learning latent transitions, they lack explicit mechanisms to suppress band-limited noise components that typically corrupt sensor measurements in real-world scenarios. We introduce the Frequency-Weighted Neural Kalman Filter (FW-NKF), a unified hybrid approach that embeds a causal spectral-shaping operator into the Kalman measurement residual and jointly learns observation, and transition networks. By adapting both the filter spectrum and the latent state representation, FW-NKF attenuates the noise-dominated frequency bands while capturing complex residual structures. We conduct extensive experiments on four heterogeneous benchmarks, including chaotic systems such as multi-dimensional Lorenz systems and full-body inertial pose estimation, and find a reduction in localization error of up to 10% as well as marked improvements in orientation accuracy. Our ablation studies confirm that frequency weighting and deep latent-state modeling contribute to overall performance.

Speakers in dialogue continuously adapt their communicative behavior across acoustic, lexical, and semantic dimensions, a phenomenon known as conversational entrainment. Modeling this process requires representations that capture the global structure of interaction, yet prior approaches fail to disentangle dyad-specific patterns from speaker-specific traits, limiting their ability to capture true conversational adaptation. We address this with the Dyadic Distance Matrix (DDM), which encodes all pairwise similarities between the turns of two speakers over an entire conversation, capturing long-range cross-speaker dependencies. This raises a key question: does the DDM represent genuine interaction, or merely reflect individual speaker characteristics? We propose the speaker-switch test, a principled control in which one speaker's turns are replaced with those from an unrelated speaker drawn from a different conversation. This preserves turn-level statistics while disrupting the original dyadic coadaptation. The ability to distinguish real from switched DDMs thus directly evaluates whether the representation encodes interaction-specific structure. Across four embedding types and classifiers including ResNet-50 on the CANDOR corpus, real DDMs are consistently distinguishable from their switched counterparts. Comparisons with LibriSpeech show higher discriminability in read speech, highlighting the role of prosodic variability in naturalistic conversations. GradCAM analysis further reveals distinct structural signatures driving classification. These results establish the speaker-switch test as a robust diagnostic for validating representations of dyadic conversational interaction.

Anastomotic leak remains one of the most serious complications following colorectal cancer surgery, substantially affecting patient outcomes, recovery trajectories, and healthcare costs. Despite advances in imaging technology, current preoperative assessment relies only on clinical assessment, a process that is subjective, error-prone, and highly dependent on individual expertise. To date, no validated CT-based method exists to predict anastomotic leak risk prior to surgery. This protocol paper outlines a comprehensive framework for developing and validating an AI-driven system for preoperative risk assessment using pre- and post-contrast CT imaging. The study describes the stages of data collection, ethical handling, and preprocessing of patient data in accordance with GDPR, image preprocessing, and the exploration of deep learning architectures designed to generate clinically interpretable outputs. Two integrated tools constitute the main deliverables of this workflow: 1) a risk assessment module, which quantifies the likelihood of leakage by analyzing vascular and tissue features in CT scans, and 2) a Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval (CBMIR) module, which identifies and displays similar historical cases to support evidence-based surgical decision making. The protocol paper requires close collaboration between hospitals and universities; this protocol demonstrates that such a system is technically feasible and clinically implementable within existing healthcare infrastructures. By following the proposed methodological stages and regulatory principles, other institutions can reproduce this workflow to develop analogous decision-support tools. Ultimately, this interdisciplinary framework aims to enhance surgical planning, reduce leak incidence, and contribute to a broader paradigm shift toward explainable, data-driven precision surgery.

Effective scheduling in the energy sector is essential to ensure the reliable operation of electrical grids and their connected assets by, for instance, optimizing the dispatch of generation units and storage systems. An effective planning strategy must (a) accommodate advanced and potentially non-linear system models -- exploiting the increasing data availability of modern grids, and (b) explicitly handle uncertainties arising, for instance, from the integration of renewable energy sources. While existing approaches can address either non-linearity (e.g., Monte Carlo Tree Search) or uncertainty (e.g., stochastic mathematical optimization), there is a lack of planning techniques capable of addressing both challenges simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose a Stochastic Scenario-Structured Tree Search (S3TS) algorithm that explicitly represents uncertainty through scenario trees while enabling the integration of advanced non-linear models. We evaluate S3TS on a simulated demand response signal publication problem, largely mimicking the imbalance settlement mechanism in Belgium. The results demonstrate near-optimal performance in linear, analytically tractable settings, with costs within 14% of the mathematically optimal solution conditioned to the scenario trees. In highly non-linear scenarios, S3TS significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving cost reductions of up to 51% and 5.4% compared to a myopic algorithm and deterministic MCTS, respectively.

The localization of moving sound sources using a microphone array is typically based on modifying the signal to compensate for the Doppler effect. In the time domain this compensation is done on a sample-by-sample basis. In the frequency domain short time segments need to be used in which the Doppler effect is assumed to be approximately constant and a discrete Fourier transform is done on each segment. In contrast, the authors developed an inverse 2.5D localization method for uniformly moving single-frequency sources that works in the spectral domain and allows for the use of longer windows. This was achieved by modifying the 2.5D forward model to directly compute the effect of the motion in the static observer position. The method does neither require to modify the measured signal nor does it require quasi-stationary of the measurements within the window used. Unfortunately, this approach is not directly suitable for broad-band stochastic sources, and in the present work we will investigate how the statistical properties of a uniformly moving stochastic source change when observed at a static observer. Using a 2.5D setting, the relation between the power spectral density of the moving source and the Loève spectrum, which is a generalization of the cross-spectral density at the static receivers, was derived. Based on simulated data with speeds up to 100 m\,s$^{-1}$, the work presented here provides a proof of concept for a method based on multi-taper estimates for the Loève spectrum to localize moving broad-band stochastic sources . Currently, the method requires a stationary source signal and that the spectral density is flat within a certain range around the frequency of interest. Also, correlations between sources are currently not considered.

This paper develops a switched event-triggered adaptive boundary control for a class of reaction-diffusion PDE-ODE cascade systems, where the system and input matrices in the ODE as well as the spatially-varying reaction coefficient in the PDE are uncertain. A two-step backstepping transformation is constructed to derive the continuous-time control law. Then a novel dynamic event-triggered control strategy for the PDE-ODE cascade is proposed based on a switched event-triggering mechanism, ensuring global exponential stability of the closed-loop system in place of the exponential convergence commonly achieved with backstepping-based classical dynamic ETC, while inherently excluding Zeno behavior. To address the uncertainties in the PDE-ODE cascade, adaptive update laws are developed, leading to time-varying gain kernels that are adaptively scheduled through the event-triggered control mechanism. Furthermore,to facilitate efficient real-time implementation, deep neural operators (DeepONet) are employed to approximate the backstepping kernels as mappings from the estimated parameters to kernel functions, thereby eliminating the need to repeatedly solve kernel PDEs online. Through a Lyapunov analysis that incorporates the effects of the event-triggering mechanism, parameter adaptation, and kernel approximation errors, we prove the $L^2$ global asymptotic regulation of the resulting closed-loop system. In summary, the key contributions of the paper are threefold: (i) developing an adaptive DeepONet-based framework for reaction-diffusion PDE-ODE cascade systems; (ii) extending the existing adaptive event-triggered control design for reaction-diffusion PDEs to the case with more complex uncertainties; and (iii) generalizing switched dynamic ETC with global exponential stability to PDE-ODE cascades. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through numerical simulations.

Wireless connectivity underpins modern society and industry, enabling critical applications such as 5G ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) for industrial automation. However, the openness of the wireless medium exposes it to spectrum anomalies, including unintentional interference and malicious jamming, which threaten communication and sensing functionalities in 5G and emerging 6G networks. Despite its importance, spectrum anomaly detection research is hindered by a lack of publicly available datasets reflecting real-world scenarios. To address this, we present a benchmark dataset for spectrum anomaly detection in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems, a core technology for 5G and beyond. The dataset includes spectrograms generated across a distributed network of sensing units, covering five distinct jammer types, from simple noise to advanced pilot-aware attacks. These anomalies are simulated in an industrial factory environment using a versatile open-source framework developed and published as part of this work, enabling extensibility to new scenarios and interference types. We provide baseline evaluations for supervised and unsupervised learning methods, demonstrating the challenges posed by different jammers and highlighting areas for further research. The dataset and framework support reproducible studies and serve as a foundation for advancing spectrum anomaly detection, with applications extending to network digital twins. By bridging the gap in open dataset availability, this work empowers the research community to validate and compare advanced detection methods for resilient next-generation wireless systems.

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery requires models that capture both global context and local detail under tight computational budgets. Prior work typically optimizes for one of these axes: attention for global context, convolution for local detail, or compactness for efficiency. While hybrid approaches aim to capture both, they require architectural changes and encoder backbones with computational overhead, limiting efficiency and performance. We present LALE (Lightweight-transformer Architecture for Land-cover Estimation), an end-to-end remote sensing image segmentation architecture, that bifurcates its encoder by resolution: lightweight ConvMixer stages handle high-resolution local features, while transformer stages handle low-resolution global context, confining the quadratic cost of self-attention to deep, downsampled feature maps. An all-MLP multi-scale decoder, together with RMSNorm and StarReLU throughout, further reduces compute and parameter count. On the large-scale ARAS400k remote-sensing segmentation benchmark, LALE establishes a strong efficiency-performance trade-off against CNN, transformer, and hybrid baselines. Our smallest variant, (just 1.6M parameters), reaches within 2.6 F1 points of the best baseline (UPerNet) while using 4.5x fewer parameters, 7x less storage, 17x fewer GMACs, and delivering 1.8x higher throughput.

The rise of low-altitude economies and 6G is driving the evolution of low-altitude networks (LANs), making communication security a pressing concern. Unlike traditional security approaches, covert communication offers enhanced protection by hiding the transmission behavior itself. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), a key technology of 6G, efficiently supports both sensing and communication tasks through hardware integration, thereby promising significant gains for covert communication. Nevertheless, the complexity and dynamics of urban environments pose critical challenges. Drawing on the latest advances in smart radio environment (SRE) technologies, this paper introduces them into integrated sensing and covert communication (ISACC) to suppress covert channel fading and counteract sensing precision loss in LANs. We first survey the applications and state-of-the-art findings of ISACC in LANs, highlighting key practical challenges. Subsequently, we introduce the core concept of SRE and elaborate on its enabling techniques across four dimensions. To deliver more insights, we explore potential pathways for integrating SRE into ISACC. To maximize covert throughput, a reinforcement learning-based case study is conducted by jointly optimizing flight trajectory, jamming power, movable antenna position, bandwidth allocation, and beamforming vectors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared to the benchmark. Finally, some open challenges and potential directions are discussed.

The Automatic Generation Control (AGC) system, reliant on real-time measurements over communication networks, is susceptible to stealthy false data injection attacks (FDIAs), risking equipment damage and economic losses. We propose a robust FDIA detection method using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of a drifted multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. Independent of load observability, in various cyberattack scenarios, the proposed FDIA detection method delivers accurate and rapid detection of sophisticated FDIAs, outperforming traditional unknown input observer (UIO) methods, which miss detections, and Long Short-Term Memory Autoencoder (LSTM-AE) approaches, which suffer from prolonged detection times.

Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in video generation. However, whether such models are truly aware of the 3D structure underlying visual observations, rather than simply reproducing plausible 2D projections, remains an open question. In this work, we investigate this question through human motion control, a task that requires precise modelling of 3D human geometry, motion, camera viewpoint, and scene context. Unlike prior methods that rely on rendered 2D motion guidance videos, we propose a render-free framework that conditions video generation directly on compressed 3D human mesh tokens. This representation preserves full 3D geometric information while enabling a unified token-based generation pipeline that processes video tokens jointly with motion tokens in a DiT-based architecture. This design requires the model to reason jointly about appearance, 3D structure, and camera viewpoint during video generation. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance on human motion control benchmarks, while reducing artifacts induced by view-dependent 2D guidance and trajectory-pose mismatches during editing. These findings suggest that video diffusion models, when equipped with mesh tokenization, can better capture complex 3D human structures and their interactions with the surrounding environment.

The evolution from 5G to 5G-Advanced and the vision of 6G demand unprecedented levels of network performance, in which meeting stringent network Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including capacity, latency, coverage, and reliability, is critical to supporting emerging applications such as autonomous driving, industrial automation, and immersive communications. Traditional reactive network management is insufficient in this context, driving the need for predictive, data-driven approaches. Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a key enabler, enabling the forecasting of KPI trends from diverse data sources and thereby enabling proactive, AI-native automation in mobile networks. This survey provides the first comprehensive and systematic review of data-driven KPI prediction methods for future 6G networks. We introduce a multi-dimensional taxonomy that classifies prediction approaches by KPI type, data source, the network protocol stack at which the KPI is predicted, prediction horizon, model family, and prediction objective. Using this taxonomy, we analyze the state of the art across various KPIs, highlighting representative methods ranging from classical statistical models to deep learning and reinforcement learning. We further discuss enabling system aspects, including data collection and learning architectures, and examine deployment challenges, including data availability, scalability, privacy, and sustainability. Finally, we outline open research directions spanning new KPI definitions, probabilistic and explainable predictions. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a structured understanding of the KPI prediction landscape and a roadmap toward predictive network automation in future 6G systems.

Reliable autonomous UAV swarms in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions require fault-tolerant coordination capable of sustaining operations despite agent degradation. This paper introduces the Intelligent Replanning Drone Swarm (IRDS), a distributed coordination architecture designed for resource-constrained environments. The proposed framework employs a Reverse-Auction market mechanism where agents bid to service search sectors based on a distance-weighted cost function, coupled with a geometric consensus protocol for target verification. We evaluate the approach through physics-based simulations (N=8 agents, 8x8 grid) subjected to stochastic fault injection. Results indicate that the swarm autonomously reallocates tasks from failed agents with low latency relative to the total mission duration, maintaining a mission success rate of 93% under 25% workforce degradation. The proposed framework demonstrates a robust, empirically tested method for self-healing aerial robotic coordination.

The separation of multicomponent signals with crossing instantaneous frequency (IF) curves remains a fundamental challenge in time-frequency analysis. Although the synchrosqueezed wavelet-chirplet transform (SWCT) enhances time-frequency readability by introducing a chirprate variable, its effectiveness is constrained by the underlying assumption of local linear chirp. Consequently, this method does not perform well when analyzing signals characterized by strong frequency modulation. This paper extends the SWCT framework by relaxing the linear chirp assumption. We model signal components as having polynomial phase behavior over short intervals and derive compact expressions for high-order IF and chirprate reassignment operators. The proposed high-order synchrosqueezed wavelet-chirplet transform (HSWCT) enables accurate estimation of both IF and chirprate, and supports robust mode retrieval even with intersecting IF curves. Another key contribution is a rigorous mathematical analysis of the approximation errors of arbitrary-order reassignment operators for IF and chirprate estimation. When the chirprate vanishes, HSWCT simplifies to the traditional high-order synchrosqueezed wavelet transform. To our best knowledge, no theoretical analysis exists in the literature on the approximation of arbitrary-order SST IF reassignment operators to the IF. As a by-product of this work, our established theorem provides such an analysis, thereby filling a gap in the theoretical framework of high-order SSTs.

Actuator saturation is a fundamental nonlinearity that significantly degrades the performance of PID-controlled systems by inducing integrator windup, leading to overshoot, slow recovery, and even instability. Although numerous anti-windup strategies have been proposed, their practical tuning remains largely heuristic and suboptimal in many industrial scenarios. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of classical and advanced anti-windup techniques for PI-controlled first-order-plus-dead-time (FOPDT) processes under a wide range of operating conditions. The analysis includes dynamic and instantaneous back-calculation, conditional integration, and adapted schemes. In addition, a novel hybrid anti-windup strategy is proposed, combining conditional integration with dynamic back-calculation to improve responsiveness during saturation, whilst preserving smooth recovery dynamics. Moreover, a key contribution of this work is the development of systematic tuning rules for the tracking time constant in back-calculation schemes, specifically optimised for load-disturbance rejection. These rules are derived from an extensive optimisation study that considers the saturation ratio, controller aggressiveness, and disturbance characteristics. The resulting guidelines provide simple yet effective formulas that achieve near-optimal performance without requiring complex computations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly outperform commonly used heuristic rules, particularly in disturbance rejection scenarios, and provide clear, practical recommendations for selecting and tuning anti-windup strategies in industrial applications.

We present Echo, a proof-of-concept audio system built around a single 25 M-parameter ViT encoder. The encoder is pretrained with a JEPA objective and then specialised by stages to carry speaker identity, phonetic content, and dynamic source routing in the same 512-dimensional latent space, with no per-task fine-tuning at deployment. Light heads handle diarization (ArcFace + VBx) and dynamic source separation (null-target K-set prediction). On synthetic VoxCeleb2 mixtures with unknown K, the canonical stack reaches 15.00% blind DER, 97.80% PIT separation accuracy with +9.52 dB latent SI-SDR, and a +53.50-point speaker/content factorisation gap on a held-out k-NN probe. The point of Echo is not a new SOTA on any single task but the joint coexistence of three tasks on one encoder at this footprint. We document the design stage by stage, report the dead-ends, and identify the structural wall on end-to-end ASR through the VQ bottleneck that still bounds the PoC.

Objective: laryngectomees depend on an electromechanical device to generate electrolaryngeal (EL) speech. Compared with normal speech, EL speech suffers from severe distortion, limited phonetic variation, unnatural prosody, and temporal shifts, degrading naturalness and intelligibility. Although sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) voice conversion (VC) based EL-speech-to-normal-speech conversion (EL2SP) is promising, substantial mismatches between EL and normal speech inevitably cause cumulative mapping errors that limit performance. To address this, we describe a novel representation learning framework integrating speech and text representations to improve mapping and reconstruction quality within a seq2seq VC model. Methods: our methodology comprises two main stages: 1) representation integration and learning, and 2) reconstruction training. A network capable of incorporating auxiliary text information is first constructed with pretrained modules to learn speech--text-based integrated representations. Then, an autoencoder-style reconstruction strategy finalizes EL2SP model to inherit these representations without increasing model complexity. We introduce three fusion strategies including middle-, input-, and hybrid-level fusion strategies that progressively enhance learning. Moreover, besides standard seq2seq VC objectives, an additional reconstruction loss on the integrated representation is introduced to refine representation transfer. Results: experiments under different EL2SP datasets consistently demonstrate that our methods, combined with data augmentations, outperform baselines relying solely on speech representations. Furthermore, progressive improvements with system design depth validate the effectiveness of our methods. Significance: the proposed methods provide an extensible and practical methodology for EL speech enhancement and assistive communication technologies.

Joint communication and sensing (JCAS) typically rely on coherent downconversion to recover the phase relationships required for array processing. Meanwhile, Local Oscillators (LOs) are a major source of cost, power consumption, and implementation complexity in millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-THz receivers. Existing LO-free receiver designs are typically based on envelope detection or related non-coherent operations that do not preserve inter-branch phase information, which limits their applicability to JCAS. This work proposes an LO-free JCAS receiver architecture that leverages pairwise inter-branch correlation processing to suppress the common carrier component and to synthesize relative-phase observables across the antenna array, enabling both data communication and Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimation. The transmitted symbols are designed to induce distinct phase-difference patterns, such that the resulting correlation phases contain both a data-dependent component and a DoA-dependent component. We formulate recovery as inference over a correlation graph, where branches are nodes and pairwise correlations are edges, and show that the resulting cycle-consistent redundancy enables robust relative-phase recovery under noise and perturbations. We further derive a topology-aware Cramér-Rao lower bound for DoA estimation under a locally unwrapped approximation. Numerical results confirm that increasing graph connectivity improves both bit-error rate and DoA accuracy, with sensing performance approaching the derived bound.

Wireless localization is a fundamental capability of sixth-generation (6G) networks. Conventional model-based methods require accurate modeling of the propagation environment and degrade in complex multipath and non-line-of-sight scenarios, while learning-based methods couple model parameters tightly to the training scene, requiring costly retraining whenever the base station (BS) configuration or propagation environment changes. In this paper, we propose RA-LWLM, a retrieval-augmented in-context localization framework that achieves training-free cross-scene adaptation by externalizing scene-specific information into a per-scene fingerprint database rather than encoding it in model weights. The framework consists of three components: a frozen wireless foundation model (FM) encoder that maps raw channel state information into a scene-agnostic representation; a retrieval module that selects the most informative references from the per-scene database via similarity search in the representation space; and a transformer-based in-context learning (ICL) module that fuses the query with the retrieved references to predict the user equipment (UE) position. To accommodate varying retrieval quality and propagation complexity across queries, the ICL module adopts a mixture-of-experts design in which experts specialize in different context sizes and are softly combined by a learnable selector. Extensive ray-tracing-based experiments across heterogeneous scenes with diverse BS configurations show that RA-LWLM achieves nearly identical accuracy on seen and unseen scenes without any per-scene retraining, substantially outperforming end-to-end and FM-based baselines. These results validate the proposed retrieval-augmented in-context paradigm as a scalable solution for cross-scene localization in 6G networks.

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) represent a paradigm shift in which antenna elements (ports) emulate the illusion of motion or fluidity within a spatial aperture to optimize performance. One of FAS's key use cases is the provision of open-loop fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA), enabling multiplexing gains through spatial interference nulling without requiring channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. However, this comes at the price of requiring a precise channel reconstruction at the receiver to successfully identify the optimal port. Current research efforts map this sensing task to a legacy MIMO-style estimation problem focused on minimizing global reconstruction errors such as normalized mean-squared error (NMSE). In this work, we argue that because FAS is inherently selection-based, NMSE-like approaches often lead to excessive training overhead and reduced net throughput. We revisit the problem of channel estimation and reconstruction in FAS, challenging some prevalent myths related to (i) the adequacy of global error metrics; (ii) the convenience of reconstructing channels or aggregate interference; (iii) the need for spatial oversampling; and (iv) the impact of port selection accuracy. We also identify four critical questions that must be answered for successfully enabling FAMA deployments: (i) the definition of a selection-optimal sampling law; (ii) the identification of proper reconstruction methodologies; (iii) the inherent trade-offs between multi-port sensing and selection gain; and (iv) the challenges introduced when moving towards electronically reconfigurable FAS.

Face detection with visible-spectrum cameras can capture facial features, but it often fails to distinguish live subjects from spoof sources such as photographs, masks, or statues. Previous approaches based on texture, motion, or physiological cues are sensitive to illumination changes and show limited robustness against spoofing attacks. Thermal imaging helps overcome these limitations by detecting heat emissions, naturally excluding spoof faces. This study proposes a hybrid approach that fuses the edge information of RGB images with corresponding thermal images using a custom ARISTOF dataset containing live and spoof faces. The fused images are first evaluated using the YOLOv8-Face model to compare face detection performance across RGB, thermal, and fused modalities. The results show that the proposed method enhances the face detection accuracy of thermal images. The fused images are subsequently used to train a YOLOv8-Face model for live and spoof classification, demonstrating that the proposed multimodal fusion effectively supports robust face liveness detection.