Fig. S1: The proposed framework as a probabilistic graphical model. In this section we derive the variational lower-bound introduced in Sec.2.3 of the main article. W e firstly introduce Lemmas 1 and 2 as they appear in our derivations. As illustrated in Fig.S1, the ANN's input In Fig.S1 the lower boxes are the inducing points and other variables that determine the GPs' posterior. S1.1 Deriving the Lower-bound With Respect to the Kernel-mappings In the right-hand-side of Eq.S6 only the following terms are dependant on the kernel-mappings The first term is the expected log-likelihood of a Gaussian distribution (i.e. the conditional log-likelihood of Therefore, we can use Lemma.2 to simplify the first term: E According to Lemma.1 we have that Therefore, the KL-term of Eq.S8 is a constant with respect to the kernel mappings All in all, the lower-bound for optimizing the kernel-mappings is equal to the right-hand-side of Eq.S9 which was introduced and discussed in Sec.2.3. of the main article. S1.2 Deriving the Lower-bound With Respect to the ANN Parameters According to Eq.4 of the main article, in our formulation the ANN's parameters appear as some variational parameters. Therefore, the likelihood of all variables (Eq.S6) does not generally depend on the ANN's parameters. This likelihood turns out to be equivalent to commonly-used losses like the cross-entropy loss or the mean-squared loss. Here we elaborate upon how this happens. This conclusion was introduced and discussed in Eq.6 of the main article. W e can draw similar conclusions when the pipeline is for other tasks like regression, or even a combination of tasks.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for solving differential equations and modeling physical systems by embedding physical laws into the learning process. However, rigorously quantifying how well a PINN captures the complete dynamical behavior of the system, beyond simple trajectory prediction, remains a challenge. This paper proposes a novel experimental framework to address this by employing Fisher information for differentiable dynamical systems, denoted $g_F^C$. This Fisher information, distinct from its statistical counterpart, measures inherent uncertainties in deterministic systems, such as sensitivity to initial conditions, and is related to the phase space curvature and the net stretching action of the state space evolution. We hypothesize that if a PINN accurately learns the underlying dynamics of a physical system, then the Fisher information landscape derived from the PINN's learned equations of motion will closely match that of the original analytical model. This match would signify that the PINN has achieved comprehensive fidelity capturing not only the state evolution but also crucial geometric and stability properties. We outline an experimental methodology using the dynamical model of a car to compute and compare $g_F^C$ for both the analytical model and a trained PINN. The comparison, based on the Jacobians of the respective system dynamics, provides a quantitative measure of the PINN's fidelity in representing the system's intricate dynamical characteristics.

Understanding and distinguishing temporal patterns in time series data is essential for scientific discovery and decision-making. For example, in biomedical research, uncovering meaningful patterns in physiological signals can improve diagnosis, risk assessment, and patient outcomes. However, existing methods for time series pattern discovery face major challenges, including high computational complexity, limited interpretability, and difficulty in capturing meaningful temporal structures. To address these gaps, we introduce a novel learning framework that jointly trains two Transformer models using complementary time series representations: shapelet-based representations to capture localized temporal structures and traditional feature engineering to encode statistical properties. The learned shapelets serve as interpretable signatures that differentiate time series across classification labels. Additionally, we develop a visual analytics system -- SigTIme -- with coordinated views to facilitate exploration of time series signatures from multiple perspectives, aiding in useful insights generation. We quantitatively evaluate our learning framework on eight publicly available datasets and one proprietary clinical dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through two usage scenarios along with the domain experts: one involving public ECG data and the other focused on preterm labor analysis.

Controllable human voice generation, particularly for expressive domains like singing, remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces Vevo2, a unified framework for controllable speech and singing voice generation. To tackle issues like the scarcity of annotated singing data and to enable flexible controllability, Vevo2 introduces two audio tokenizers: (1) a unified music-notation-free prosody tokenizer that captures prosody and melody from speech, singing, and even instrumental sounds, and (2) a unified content-style tokenizer that encodes linguistic content, prosody, and style for both speech and singing, while enabling timbre disentanglement. Vevo2 consists of an auto-regressive (AR) content-style modeling stage, which aims to enable controllability over text, prosody, and style, as well as a flow-matching acoustic modeling stage that allows for timbre control. Particularly, during the speech-singing joint training of the AR model, we propose both explicit and implicit prosody learning strategies to bridge speech and singing voice. Moreover, to further enhance the Vevo2's ability to follow text and prosody, we design a multi-objective post-training task that integrates both intelligibility and prosody similarity alignment. Experimental results show that the unified modeling in Vevo2 brings mutual benefits to both speech and singing voice generation. Additionally, Vevo2's effectiveness across a wide range of synthesis, conversion, and editing tasks for both speech and singing further demonstrates its strong generalization ability and versatility. Audio samples are are available at https://versasinger.github.io/.

Abstract--Orographic soaring can significantly extend the endurance of micro aerial vehicles (MA Vs), but circling behavior, arising from control conflicts between longitudinal and vertical axes, increases energy consumption and the risk of divergence. We propose a control switching method, named SAOS: Switched Control for Autonomous Orographic Soaring, which mitigates circling behavior by selectively controlling either the horizontal or vertical axis, effectively transforming the system from under-actuated to fully actuated during soaring. Additionally, the angle of attack is incorporated into the INDI controller to improve force estimation. Simulations with randomized initial positions and wind tunnel experiments on two MA Vs demonstrate that the SAOS improves position convergence, reduces throttle usage, and mitigates roll oscillations caused by pitch-roll coupling. These improvements enhance energy efficiency and flight stability in constrained soaring environments. The flight endurance of micro air vehicles (MA Vs) significantly constrains operational capabilities, limiting the scope of missions they can perform [1], [2]. This limitation is not solely due to inherently short flight durations, but also because take-off and landing procedures typically demand substantial time, energy, effort, and space. One potential solution to this problem lies in the advancement of battery technology, which could lead to improved efficiency. However, progress in this area has been relatively slow [3], [4]. Consequently, researchers have been exploring alternative solutions, such as using energy sources with higher energy densities or enabling mid-air refueling or recharging [5], [6]. Nevertheless, these approaches require considerable investment in hardware and system infrastructure, and often necessitate larger, heavier platforms--undermining the fundamental advantage of MA Vs being small. An alternative approach is to exploit soaring, a flight technique widely employed by birds [7]-[9] and human-piloted glider aircraft [10], [11]. Soaring takes advantage of wind energy, specifically upward vertical winds, to gain altitude or remain airborne with minimal energy expenditure. A key strength of soaring is its compatibility with existing systems: it can be integrated into any fixed-wing aircraft without requiring hardware modifications, making it a valuable complement to other endurance-enhancing strategies. V arious types of soaring techniques exist [12].

With the rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the increasing complexity of low-altitude security threats, traditional UAV identification methods struggle to extract reliable signal features and meet real-time requirements in complex environments. Recently, deep learning based Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI) approaches have greatly improved recognition accuracy. However, their large model sizes and high computational demands hinder deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. While model pruning offers a general solution for complexity reduction, existing weight, channel, and layer pruning techniques struggle to concurrently optimize compression rate, hardware acceleration, and recognition accuracy. To this end, in this paper, we introduce HSCP, a Hierarchical Spectral Clustering Pruning framework that combines layer pruning with channel pruning to achieve extreme compression, high performance, and efficient inference. In the first stage, HSCP employs spectral clustering guided by Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) to identify and remove redundant layers. Subsequently, the same strategy is applied to the channel dimension to eliminate a finer redundancy. To ensure robustness, we further employ a noise-robust fine-tuning strategy. Experiments on the UAV-M100 benchmark demonstrate that HSCP outperforms existing channel and layer pruning methods. Specifically, HSCP achieves $86.39\%$ parameter reduction and $84.44\%$ FLOPs reduction on ResNet18 while improving accuracy by $1.49\%$ compared to the unpruned baseline, and maintains superior robustness even in low signal-to-noise ratio environments.

Abstract--Contrastive learning methods enforce label distance relationships in feature space to improve representation capability for regression models. However, these methods highly depend on label information to correctly recover ordinal relationships of features, limiting their applications to semi-supervised regression. In this work, we extend contrastive regression methods to allow unlabeled data to be used in the semi-supervised setting, thereby reducing the dependence on costly annotations. Particularly we construct the feature similarity matrix with both labeled and unlabeled samples in a mini-batch to reflect inter-sample relationships, and an accurate ordinal ranking of involved unlabeled samples can be recovered through spectral seriation algorithms if the level of error is within certain bounds. The introduction of labeled samples above provides regularization of the ordinal ranking with guidance from the ground-truth label information, making the ranking more reliable. T o reduce feature perturbations, we further utilize the dynamic programming algorithm to select robust features for the matrix construction. The recovered ordinal relationship is then used for contrastive learning on unlabeled samples, and we thus allow more data to be used for feature representation learning, thereby achieving more robust results. The ordinal rankings can also be used to supervise predictions on unlabeled samples, serving as an additional training signal. We provide theoretical guarantees and empirical verification through experiments on various datasets, demonstrating that our method can surpass existing state-of-the-art semi-supervised deep regression methods. Our code have been released on https://github.com/xmed-lab/CLSS.

Zero-Touch Networks (ZTNs) represent a transformative paradigm toward fully automated and intelligent network management, providing the scalability and adaptability required for the complexity of sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, the distributed architecture, high openness, and deep heterogeneity of 6G networks expand the attack surface and pose unprecedented security challenges. To address this, security automation aims to enable intelligent security management across dynamic and complex environments, serving as a key capability for securing 6G ZTNs. Despite its promise, implementing security automation in 6G ZTNs presents two primary challenges: 1) automating the lifecycle from security strategy generation to validation and update under real-world, parallel, and adversarial conditions, and 2) adapting security strategies to evolving threats and dynamic environments. This motivates us to propose SecLoop and SA-GRPO. SecLoop constitutes the first fully automated framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) across the entire lifecycle of security strategy generation, orchestration, response, and feedback, enabling intelligent and adaptive defenses in dynamic network environments, thus tackling the first challenge. Furthermore, we propose SA-GRPO, a novel security-aware group relative policy optimization algorithm that iteratively refines security strategies by contrasting group feedback collected from parallel SecLoop executions, thereby addressing the second challenge. Extensive real-world experiments on five benchmarks, including 11 MITRE ATT&CK processes and over 20 types of attacks, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SecLoop and SA-GRPO. We will release our platform to the community, facilitating the advancement of security automation towards next generation communications.

Abstract--Semantic Communication (SC) combined with V e-hicular edge computing (VEC) provides an efficient edge task processing paradigm for Internet of V ehicles (IoV). Focusing on highway scenarios, this paper proposes a Tripartite Cooperative Semantic Communication (TCSC) framework, which enables V e-hicle Users (VUs) to perform semantic task offloading via V ehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and V ehicle-to-V ehicle (V2V) communications. Considering task latency and the number of semantic symbols, the framework constructs a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem, which is transformed into two subproblems. First, we innovatively propose a multi-agent proximal policy optimization task offloading optimization method based on parametric distribution noise (MAPPO-PDN) to solve the optimization problem of the number of semantic symbols; second, linear programming (LP) is used to solve offloading ratio. Simulations show that performance of this scheme is superior to that of other algorithms.

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments using onboard visual observation. This task holds promise for real-world applications such as low-altitude inspection, search-and-rescue, and autonomous aerial delivery. Existing methods often rely on panoramic images, depth inputs, or odometry to support spatial reasoning and action planning. These requirements increase system cost and integration complexity, thus hindering practical deployment for lightweight UAVs. We present a unified aerial VLN framework that operates solely on egocentric monocular RGB observations and natural language instructions. The model formulates navigation as a next-token prediction problem, jointly optimizing spatial perception, trajectory reasoning, and action prediction through prompt-guided multi-task learning. Moreover, we propose a keyframe selection strategy to reduce visual redundancy by retaining semantically informative frames, along with an action merging and label reweighting mechanism that mitigates long-tailed supervision imbalance and facilitates stable multi-task co-training. Extensive experiments on the Aerial VLN benchmark validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the challenging monocular RGB-only setting, our model achieves strong results across both seen and unseen environments. It significantly outperforms existing RGB-only baselines and narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art panoramic RGB-D counterparts. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the contribution of our task design and architectural choices.