arXiv subjects

Jingxian Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Jingxian Wang.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SatDL: Jointly Optimizing Data Redistribution and Training for Satellite-Based Distributed Learning

Satellite-based distributed learning promises to train machine-learning models directly in orbit using massive, globally dispersed sensor data, thereby avoiding large-scale data downloads to ground servers. However, training convergence is significantly slowed by severe non-IID data, specifically label imbalance, as each satellite observes different geographic regions with distinct labels. This imbalance extends training duration and increases energy consumption for solar-powered satellites. Existing approaches either fully redistribute data to enforce IID conditions - accelerating convergence but incurring substantial communication delays - or avoid redistribution entirely by modifying local learning algorithms to mitigate the impact of label imbalance, which, however, still prolong training and increase energy use. Both extremes result in excessive total end-to-end learning time (data-transfer delay plus training time) and thus elevated onboard energy consumption. We present SatDL, a data-redistribution framework designed to minimize total end-to-end learning time. At its core, SatDL develops a Distributor-Critic framework that jointly models and optimizes data-transfer delay and training time. Evaluations through trace-driven simulations of a 1,584-satellite Starlink constellation and hardware emulations using NVIDIA Jetson and A100 GPUs across five datasets show SatDL reduces total end-to-end learning time by up to 18.6% and onboard energy consumption by 12.23-88.00%, while maintaining inference accuracy within a few percentage points of state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting-Aware In-Orbit Edge Computing for Earth Observation

Typically, Earth observation satellites follow a rule of revisiting cycle to periodically pass over the same area of the Earth at regular intervals, which is jointly determined by their orbital properties (e.g., eccentricity, inclination) and instrument characteristics (e.g., off-nadir pointing and swath capabilities). However, we have observed delays in perceived revisiting cycles where limited satellite downlink bandwidth allows only partial images to be delivered, pushing back the timeliness of the full set of data, which we term as revisiting cycle delay. In this paper, we present a revisiting-aware in-orbit edge computing framework for Earth observation termed Stride. Stride leverages the unique orbital revisiting properties to afford historical reference revisiting images onboard, and exploits the inherent temporal redundancy in the revisiting imagery to transmit only the Regions of Interest (RoIs). Specifically, Stride comprises a mono- and multi-temporal cloud indicator to alleviate cloud contamination, a coarse-to-fine reference selector for orbit deviation correction, and an ensemble-local change detector to address inter-band complexities and pixel-level perturbations. Experiments on a Flat-Sat testbed and a constellation simulator demonstrate Stride improves the Revisiting Imagery Delivery (RID) score by up to 4.55X, decreases the connectivity latency by 5.02X, and enlarges the mapping coverage by 2.56X, yielding state-of-the-art performance.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Physics-Guided Sequence-Based Generative Framework for Acoustic Metamaterial Inverse Design

Acoustic metamaterial (AMM) inverse design is particularly challenging for broadband target responses due to acoustic dispersion: a structure that matches the desired response at one frequency may deviate at others, and modifying geometry to improve one sub-band often perturbs neighboring sub-bands. Yet existing broadband inverse-design approaches are either constrained by predefined templates, or rely on image representations that fail to preserve the geometric precision and structural connectivity required by acoustic structures. We present MetaSeq, a physics-guided, sequence-based generative framework for acoustic metamaterial inverse design. At its core, MetaSeq introduces a language that represents each AMM as a structured sequence, rather than as a pixel grid or fixed template. This representation preserves precise geometry, explicitly encodes connectivity, and casts inverse design as a sequence-to-sequence task from target response to structure sequence. MetaSeq further constructs a balanced, high-fidelity dataset with efficient calibration and complexity-based sampling. To address the one-to-many nature of inverse design, MetaSeq combines supervised pretraining with reinforcement learning fine-tuning guided by a physics-based solver and validity checker. Extensive evaluations against COMSOL and five baselines show that MetaSeq reduces response error by 45% over the best baseline.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Deep Attention Reweighting: Post-Hoc Attention-Based Feature Aggregation in CNNs for Disentangling Core and Spurious Features under Spurious Correlations

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often exploit spurious correlations in datasets, learning superficially predictive yet causally irrelevant features, leading to poor generalization and fairness issues. Deep Feature Reweighting (DFR) is a post-hoc technique that reduces a trained model's reliance on spurious correlations by retraining its classification head on a target dataset. However, we show that DFR is fundamentally constrained by operating on entangled features, limiting its ability to amplify the core features while simultaneously suppressing the spurious ones. We trace this entanglement to the ubiquitous Global Average Pooling (GAP) layer, which indiscriminately collapses spatially distinct core and spurious features into a single representation. To address this, we propose Deep Attention Reweighting (DAR), a post-hoc attention-based aggregation module that replaces GAP and is retrained jointly with the classification head. DAR computes an adaptive weighting of spatial locations across feature maps, enabling selective suppression of spurious features before the collapse into entangled features. Across various datasets, metrics, and ablations, DAR consistently outperforms DFR, demonstrating that our attention-based aggregation mitigates GAP-induced entanglement and reduces spurious reliance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Cumulative Meta-Learning from Active Learning Queries for Robustness to Spurious Correlations

Spurious correlations in real-world datasets cause machine learning models to rely on irrelevant patterns, undermining reliability, generalization, and fairness. Active learning offers a promising way to address this failure mode by querying informative samples that distinguish core features from spurious ones. However, standard active-learning methods simply append queried examples to the labeled set, effectively updating only the likelihood term. In deep learning regimes, the influence of these informative samples can be diluted by the larger labeled set and memorized by overparameterized models. We propose Cumulative Active Meta-Learning (CAML), an active-learning framework that uses queried examples to meta-learn the prior, or inductive bias, governing how the model adapts. CAML casts each active-learning round as a meta-learning task: the current labeled set serves as meta-train data for adaptation, while the newly queried batch serves as meta-test data for evaluating generalization. Unlike conventional meta-learning, which treats tasks as independent and identically distributed, CAML exploits the sequential dependence between active-learning rounds by maintaining a cumulative inductive bias that is progressively refined. Theoretically, we show that this cumulative formulation introduces interaction terms that couple earlier meta-learned inductive biases with later query-induced objectives, capturing dependencies absent from standard meta-learning. Empirically, CAML improves minority-group accuracy across spurious-correlation benchmarks and acquisition strategies, with gains of up to 27.8% on Dominoes, 29.9% on Waterbirds, 14.3% on SpuCo, and 24.0% on CivilComments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Assessing socio-economic climate impacts from text data

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) have enabled the systematic use of large-scale textual data from news, social media, and reports to create datasets with socio-economic impacts of climate hazards such as floods, droughts, storms, and multi-hazard events. As the field of text-as-data for impact assessment expands, so does its methodological complexity. Yet research remains fragmented, with no clear guidelines for defining what constitutes an impact, handling temporal and spatial biases, and selecting appropriate modeling and post-processing strategies. This lack of coherence limits transparency and comparability across studies. Here, we address this gap by synthesising common practices, describing key challenges specific to the use of text-as-data methods for analyzing socio-economic impact data, and proposing recommendations to address them. By providing guidance on best practices, we aim to support the construction of robust text-derived socio-economic impact datasets that can more accurately inform disaster risk management and attribution studies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Rollbot: a Spherical Robot Driven by a Single Actuator

Spherical robots typically require at least two actuators to achieve controlled 2D planar motion. Here we present Rollbot, the first spherical robot capable of controllably maneuvering on a 2D plane with a single actuator, challenging this assumption. Rollbot rolls on the ground in a circular pattern and controls its motion by changing the trajectory's curvature by accelerating and decelerating its single motor and the attached mass according to our derived quasi-stable state dynamics and control laws. We present the theoretical analysis, design, and control of Rollbot, and demonstrate its ability to move in a controllable circular pattern and follow waypoints, validating the efficacy of the proposed theoretical framework.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Computational Design of a Low-Visibility UAV Using a Human-Aligned Perceptual Metric

We introduce Phantom Twist, a type of single-propeller UAV designed to achieve low visibility through high-speed spinning and the exploitation of motion blur. We develop a two-stage automated design pipeline that optimizes the placement of functional components including batteries, control PCB, motor-propeller assembly, and counterweights. The pipeline minimizes visibility as measured by a human-aligned perceptual metric (LPIPS) while strictly satisfying inertial and aerodynamic constraints required for stable flight. We validate this approach through fabrication and flight testing of multiple prototypes. These tests confirm that our pipeline produces stable, controllable designs and that the optimized UAV exhibits significantly reduced visual perceptibility compared to conventional quadcopters.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots

Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological counterparts, legged machines have largely converged over the past decade to canonical quadrupedal and bipedal architectures that cannot be easily reconfigured to meet new tasks or recover from injury. Here we introduce autonomous modular legs: agile yet minimal, single-degree-of-freedom jointed links that can learn complex dynamic behaviors and may be freely attached to form multilegged machines at the meter scale. This enables rapid repair, redesign, and recombination of highly-dynamic modular agents that move quickly and acrobatically (non-quasistatically) through unstructured environments. Because each module is itself a complete agent, the bodies that contain them can sustain deep structural damage that would completely disable other legged robots. We also show how to encode the vast space of possible body configurations into a compact latent design space that can be efficiently explored, revealing a wide diversity of novel legged forms.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

A Single-Chain Backscatter Tag for Multi-Sensor Multiplexing

Many real-world sensing tasks require co-located, multi-modal measurements at a single site, typically a bundle of two to five sensors, for example, in plant stress sensing and blood pressure estimation. RF-backscatter devices have emerged as a low-power solution for sensing, yet existing backscatter tags support a single sensor. Placing several single-sensor tags at one site increases attachment footprint and induces mutual coupling between nearby tag antennas, thereby limiting practical deployment. We present MATRIX, a single-chain multi-sensor backscatter tag that concurrently supports multiple onboard sensors and multiplexes them as a composite voltage, then backscatters it through one analog modulation chain. Rather than time-division polling, which introduces inter-sensor sampling offsets, or frequency-division, which requires independent per-sensor modulation chains, MATRIX introduces a voltage-division multiplexing architecture in which each sensor value is encoded as a PWM waveform, carrying the measurement in its duty cycle and reserving the amplitude for multiplexing. To support reliable demultiplexing, MATRIX selects the voltage-division weights in a binary-weighted geometric progression so that every active-sensor set maps to a uniquely invertible, well-spaced composite voltage. The composite voltage is then converted into backscatter frequency shifts through a single modulation chain. At the receiver, MATRIX formulates demultiplexing as a Hidden Markov Model to recover per-sensor readings while tolerating analog hardware imperfections and multipath. MATRIX's ASIC design consumes 25.56uW. Detailed evaluation shows that the prototype, multiplexing five sensors, achieves 20 dB average signal reconstruction SNR at a 30 kHz sampling frequency; we further validate MATRIX with case studies in plant sensing, health monitoring, and microphone-based direction finding.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

A Single Motor Nano Aerial Vehicle with Novel Peer-to-Peer Communication and Sensing Mechanism

Communication and position sensing are among the most important capabilities for swarm robots to interact with their peers and perform tasks collaboratively. However, the hardware required to facilitate communication and position sensing is often too complicated, expensive, and bulky to be carried on swarm robots. Here we present Maneuverable Piccolissimo 3 (MP3), a minimalist, single motor drone capable of executing inter-robot communication via infrared light and triangulation-based sensing of relative bearing, distance, and elevation using message arrival time. Thanks to its novel design, MP3 can communicate with peers and localize itself using simple components, keeping its size and mass small and making it inherently safe for human interaction. We present the hardware and software design of MP3 and demonstrate its capability to localize itself, fly stably, and maneuver in the environment using peer-to-peer communication and sensing.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

An Empirical Study of the Impact of Federated Learning on Machine Learning Model Accuracy

Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed ML model training on private user data at the global scale. Despite the potential of FL demonstrated in many domains, an in-depth view of its impact on model accuracy remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate, systematically, how this learning paradigm can affect the accuracy of state-of-the-art ML models for a variety of ML tasks. We present an empirical study that involves various data types: text, image, audio, and video, and FL configuration knobs: data distribution, FL scale, client sampling, and local and global computations. Our experiments are conducted in a unified FL framework to achieve high fidelity, with substantial human efforts and resource investments. Based on the results, we perform a quantitative analysis of the impact of FL, and highlight challenging scenarios where applying FL degrades the accuracy of the model drastically and identify cases where the impact is negligible. The detailed and extensive findings can benefit practical deployments and future development of FL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

High-Resolution Range-Doppler Imaging from One-Bit PMCW Radar via Generative Adversarial Networks

Digital modulation schemes such as PMCW have recently attracted increasing attention as possible replacements for FMCW modulation in future automotive radar systems. A significant obstacle to their widespread adoption is the expensive and power-consuming ADC required at gigahertz frequencies. To mitigate these challenges, employing low-resolution ADC, such as one-bit, has been suggested. Nonetheless, using one-bit sampling results in the loss of essential information. This study explores two RD imaging methods in PMCW radar systems utilizing NN. The first method merges standard RD signal processing with a GAN, whereas the second method uses an E2E strategy in which traditional signal processing is substituted with an NN-based RD module. The findings indicate that these methods can substantially improve the probability of detecting targets in the range-Doppler domain.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

PCBot: a Minimalist Robot Designed for Swarm Applications

Complexity, cost, and power requirements for the actuation of individual robots can play a large factor in limiting the size of robotic swarms. Here we present PCBot, a minimalist robot that can precisely move on an orbital shake table using a bi-stable solenoid actuator built directly into its PCB. This allows the actuator to be built as part of the automated PCB manufacturing process, greatly reducing the impact it has on manual assembly. Thanks to this novel actuator design, PCBot has merely five major components and can be assembled in under 20 seconds, potentially enabling them to be easily mass-manufactured. Here we present the electro-magnetic and mechanical design of PCBot. Additionally, a prototype robot is used to demonstrate its ability to move in a straight line as well as follow given paths.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

Distributed Localization without Direct Communication Inspired by Statistical Mechanics

Distributed localization is essential in many robotic collective tasks such as shape formation and self-assembly.Inspired by the statistical mechanics of energy transition, this paper presents a fully distributed localization algorithm named as virtual particle exchange (VPE) localization algorithm, where each robot repetitively exchanges virtual particles (VPs) with neighbors and eventually obtains its relative position from the virtual particle (VP) amount it owns. Using custom-designed hardware and protocol, VPE localization algorithm allows robots to achieve localization using sensor readings only, avoiding direct communication with neighbors and keeping anonymity. Moreover, VPE localization algorithm determines the swarm center automatically, thereby eliminating the requirement of fixed beacons to embody the origin of coordinates. Theoretical analysis proves that the VPE localization algorithm can always converge to the same result regardless of initial state and has low asymptotic time and memory complexity. Extensive localization simulations with up to 10000 robots and experiments with 52 lowcost robots are carried out, which verify that VPE localization algorithm is scalable, accurate and robust to sensor noises. Based on the VPE localization algorithm, shape formations are further achieved in both simulations and experiments with 52 robots, illustrating that the algorithm can be directly applied to support swarm collaborative tasks.

cs.RO↗