Abstract--Integrated Satellite-Aerial-Terrestrial Networks (ISATNs) are envisioned as key enablers of 6G, providing global connectivity for applications such as autonomous transportation, Industrial IoT, and disaster response. ISATN-specific control knobs, including carbon-aware handovers, UA V duty-cycling, and renewable-aware edge placement, are exploited to reduce emissions. I. Introduction The rapid evolution of next-generation communication systems is driving the integration of Satellite, Aerial, and Terrestrial Networks (ISATNs) into a unified infrastructure capable of delivering seamless global connectivity. This convergence is critical for enabling emerging applications such as autonomous transportation, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), remote healthcare, and disaster response, where reliable, low-latency, and high-capacity communication is essential [ 1 ]. However, the energy consumption associated with operating dense terrestrial base stations, satellite constellations, and aerial platforms introduces significant carbon emissions, posing new challenges for designing energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable integrated networks. As communication networks scale toward 6G and beyond, addressing carbon emissions and energy optimization has become a priority. The increasing reliance on renewable energy sources and fluctuating carbon intensity in power grids demand intelligent orchestration mechanisms capable of balancing Quality of Service (QoS) with environmental impact. S. Javaid is with the College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, and the State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai 201210, China N. Saeed is with the Department of Electrical and Communication Engineering, College of Engineering, UAE University, Al-Ain 15551, UAE (e-mail: mr.nasir.saeed@ieee.org).

Recent advances in neural interfacing have enabled significant improvements in human-computer interaction, rehabilitation, and neuromuscular diagnostics. Motor unit (MU) decomposition from surface electromyography (sEMG) is a key technique for extracting neural drive information, but traditional blind source separation (BSS) methods fail to incorporate biophysical constraints, limiting their accuracy and interpretability. In this work, we introduce a novel Biophysical-Model-Informed Source Separation (BMISS) framework, which integrates anatomically accurate forward EMG models into the decomposition process. By leveraging MRI-based anatomical reconstructions and generative modeling, our approach enables direct inversion of a biophysically accurate forward model to estimate both neural drive and motor neuron properties in an unsupervised manner. Empirical validation in a controlled simulated setting demonstrates that BMISS achieves higher fidelity motor unit estimation while significantly reducing computational cost compared to traditional methods. This framework paves the way for non-invasive, personalized neuromuscular assessments, with potential applications in clinical diagnostics, prosthetic control, and neurorehabilitation.

This paper tackles the challenging problem of gridless two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for a uniform circular array (UCA) from a single snapshot of data. Conventional gridless methods often fail in this scenario due to prohibitive computational costs or a lack of robustness. We propose a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by jointly estimating a manifold transformation matrix and the source azimuth-elevation pairs within a single, unified optimization problem. This problem is solved efficiently using an inexact Augmented Lagrangian Method (iALM), which completely circumvents the need for semidefinite programming. By unifying the objectives of data fidelity and transformation robustness, our approach is uniquely suited for the demanding single-snapshot case. Simulation results confirm that the proposed iALM framework provides robust and high-resolution, gridless 2D-DOA estimates, establishing its efficacy for challenging array signal processing applications.

Visual navigation is a fundamental problem in embodied AI, yet practical deployments demand long-horizon planning capabilities to address multi-objective tasks. A major bottleneck is data scarcity: policies learned from limited data often overfit and fail to generalize OOD. Existing neural network-based agents typically increase architectural complexity that paradoxically become counterproductive in the small-sample regime. This paper introduce NeuRO, a integrated learning-to-optimize framework that tightly couples perception networks with downstream task-level robust optimization. Specifically, NeuRO addresses core difficulties in this integration: (i) it transforms noisy visual predictions under data scarcity into convex uncertainty sets using Partially Input Convex Neural Networks (PICNNs) with conformal calibration, which directly parameterize the optimization constraints; and (ii) it reformulates planning under partial observability as a robust optimization problem, enabling uncertainty-aware policies that transfer across environments. Extensive experiments on both unordered and sequential multi-object navigation tasks demonstrate that NeuRO establishes SoTA performance, particularly in generalization to unseen environments. Our work thus presents a significant advancement for developing robust, generalizable autonomous agents.

This paper tackles the challenging problem of jointly inferring time-varying network topologies and imputing missing data from partially observed graph signals. We propose a unified non-convex optimization framework to simultaneously recover a sequence of graph Laplacian matrices while reconstructing the unobserved signal entries. Unlike conventional decoupled methods, our integrated approach facilitates a bidirectional flow of information between the graph and signal domains, yielding superior robustness, particularly in high missing-data regimes. To capture realistic network dynamics, we introduce a fused-lasso type regularizer on the sequence of Laplacians. This penalty promotes temporal smoothness by penalizing large successive changes, thereby preventing spurious variations induced by noise while still permitting gradual topological evolution. For solving the joint optimization problem, we develop an efficient Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm, which leverages the problem's structure to yield closed-form solutions for both the graph and signal subproblems. This design ensures scalability to large-scale networks and long time horizons. On the theoretical front, despite the inherent non-convexity, we establish a convergence guarantee, proving that the proposed ADMM scheme converges to a stationary point. Furthermore, we derive non-asymptotic statistical guarantees, providing high-probability error bounds for the graph estimator as a function of sample size, signal smoothness, and the intrinsic temporal variability of the graph. Extensive numerical experiments validate the approach, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both convergence speed and the joint accuracy of graph learning and signal recovery.

Existing expert merging strategies for Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) typically rely on input-dependent or input-independent averaging of expert parameters, but often lack a principled weighting mechanism. In this work, we reinterpret expert merging through the lens of game theory, revealing cooperative and competitive dynamics among experts. Based on this perspective, we introduce Nash Merging of Experts (NAMEx), a novel framework that incorporates Nash Bargaining into the merging process, enabling more balanced and efficient collaboration among experts. Additionally, we incorporate complex momentum into NAMEx to accelerate expert propagation with theoretical guarantees for convergence. Extensive experiments across language modelling, text classification, image classification, and zero-shot robustness under data corruption show that NAMEx consistently outperforms competing methods while integrating seamlessly with popular MoE architectures. Finally, we demonstrate NAMEx's scalability by applying it to large-scale systems, including Qwen1.5-MoE (14B) and DeepSeek-MoE (16B), where it proves effective in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings.

Abstract-- Multi-pulse magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely utilized for clinical practice such as Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. To train a robust model for multi-pulse MRI classification, it requires large and diverse data from various medical institutions while protecting privacy by preventing raw data sharing across institutions. Although federated learning (FL) is a feasible solution to address this issue, it poses challenges of model convergence due to the effect of data heterogeneity and substantial communication overhead due to large numbers of parameters transmitted within the model. To address these challenges, we propose CEPerFed, a communication-efficient personalized FL method. It mitigates the effect of data heterogeneity by incorporating client-side historical risk gradients and historical mean gradients to coordinate local and global optimization. The former is used to weight the contributions from other clients, enhancing the reliability of local updates, while the latter enforces consistency between local updates and the global optimization direction to ensure stable convergence across heterogeneous data distributions. To address the high communication overhead, we propose a hierarchical SVD (HSVD) strategy that transmits only the most critical information required for model updates. Experiments on five classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the CEPerFed method. The code will be released upon acceptance at https://github.com/LD0416/CEPerFed. Index Terms-- Personalized Federated Learning, HSVD, Dynamic Rank Selection, Multi-Pulse MRI.

Muscle force sharing is typically resolved by minimizing a specific objective function to approximate neural control strategies. An inverse optimal control approach was applied to identify the "best" objective function, among a positive linear combination of basis objective functions, associated with the gait of two post-stroke males, one high-functioning (subject S1) and one low-functioning (subject S2). It was found that the "best" objective function is subject- and leg-specific. No single function works universally well, yet the best options are usually differently weighted combinations of muscle activation- and power-minimization. Subject-specific inverse optimal control models performed best on their respective limbs (\textbf{RMSE 178/213 N, CC 0.71/0.61} for non-paretic and paretic legs of S1; \textbf{RMSE 205/165 N, CC 0.88/0.85} for respective legs of S2), but cross-subject generalization was poor, particularly for paretic legs. Moreover, minimizing the root mean square of muscle power emerged as important for paretic limbs, while minimizing activation-based functions dominated for non-paretic limbs. This may suggest different neural control strategies between affected and unaffected sides, possibly altered by the presence of spasticity. Among the 15 considered objective functions commonly used in inverse dynamics-based computations, the root mean square of muscle power was the only one explicitly incorporating muscle velocity, leading to a possible model for spasticity in the paretic limbs. Although this objective function has been rarely used, it may be relevant for modeling pathological gait, such as post-stroke gait.

Timely and reliable decision-making is vital for flood emergency response, yet it remains severely hindered by limited and imprecise situational awareness due to various budget and data accessibility constraints. Traditional flood management systems often rely on in-situ sensors to calibrate remote sensing-based large-scale flood depth forecasting models, and further take flood depth estimates to optimize flood response decisions. However, these approaches often take fixed, decision task-agnostic strategies to decide where to put in-situ sensors (e.g., maximize overall information gain) and train flood forecasting models (e.g., minimize average forecasting errors), but overlook that systems with the same sensing gain and average forecasting errors may lead to distinct decisions. To address this, we introduce a novel decision-focused framework that strategically selects locations for in-situ sensor placement and optimize spatio-temporal flood forecasting models to optimize downstream flood response decision regrets. Our end-to-end pipeline integrates four components: a contextual scoring network, a differentiable sensor selection module under hard budget constraints, a spatio-temporal flood reconstruction and forecasting model, and a differentiable decision layer tailored to task-specific objectives. Central to our approach is the incorporation of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE) to enable gradient-based learning over discrete sensor configurations, and probabilistic decision heads to enable differentiable approximation to various constrained disaster response tasks.

The rapid development of LLMs has raised concerns about their potential misuse, leading to various watermarking schemes that typically offer high detectability. However, existing watermarking techniques often face trade-off between watermark detectability and generated text quality. In this paper, we introduce Learning to Watermark (LTW), a novel selective watermarking framework that leverages multi-objective optimization to effectively balance these competing goals. LTW features a lightweight network that adaptively decides when to apply the watermark by analyzing sentence embeddings, token entropy, and current watermarking ratio. Training of the network involves two specifically constructed loss functions that guide the model toward Pareto-optimal solutions, thereby harmonizing watermark detectability and text quality. By integrating LTW with two baseline watermarking methods, our experimental evaluations demonstrate that LTW significantly enhances text quality without compromising detectability. Our selective watermarking approach offers a new perspective for designing watermarks for LLMs and a way to preserve high text quality for watermarks. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/fattyray/learning-to-watermark