Ishani Janveja | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Exploiting answer-invariant redundancies in satellite imagery for efficient VLM inference on edge

Onboard vision-language models could enable satellites to answer queries directly, but exhaustive tiled inference over high-resolution imagery is slow and energy-intensive. We identify answer-invariant token redundancy (AITR): image tiles and vision tokens that can be removed without changing the final answer. We present Rift, a two-stage system that performs query-conditioned tile pruning followed by elastic prefill to reduce token budget. We evaluate it on LLaVA-1.5 7B running on Jetson AGX Orin. Compared with exhaustive tiled inference, Rift reduces energy by 78% and latency by 69%, while increasing accuracy from 45% to 73%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

StarLoc: Pinpointing Transmitting LEO Satellites from a Single Passive Array

This paper focuses on 3D localization of transmitting satellites in low Earth orbits (LEO). 3D localization of transmitters in low orbits is an important emerging problem for many applications such as spectrum management, orbit determination, and backup for GPS failures in orbit. We present StarLoc -- a system to geolocate transmitters in space using a combination of orbital modeling and a new interferometric 3D angle-of-arrival estimation technique. StarLoc's design relies on a unique insight -- the motion of satellites is governed by orbital dynamics and is therefore along a 2D manifold in a 3D space. This reduces the degrees of freedom in satellite motion and allows us to 3D-locate and track a satellite with just three antennas in a 2D plane. We evaluate the system using signal transmissions from 81 Starlink satellites. Our results show that StarLoc can estimate the 3D-angle of a satellite within 0.7 degrees and the orbital range within 5 km. Our dataset and implementation are available at: https://connectedsystemslab.github.io/starloc.

cs.NI↗