arXiv subjects

Xu Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Zhu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Partial Superimposed Pilot-Aided Sparse Vector Transmission for High-Mobility URLLC

A partial superimposed pilot-aided sparse vector transmission (PSP-SVT) scheme is proposed for short-packet ultra-reliable and low-latency communications in high-mobility scenarios. Unlike conventional full superimposed pilot-aided SVT schemes, the proposed PSP-SVT scheme deploys only a few pilots over a subset of subcarriers. This sparse pilot structure is sufficient for basis expansion model based channel tracking while effectively reducing pilot-data interference. Based on the PSP pattern, an iterative receiver is developed to jointly perform channel estimation and data decoding. The reduced pilot interference in PSP-SVT provides more accurate initial channel estimation and data detection, thereby improving the subsequent iterative refinement and mitigating their error propagation. Moreover, the impacts of the number of PSPs and power allocation ratio on block error rate (BLER) performance are investigated to reveal the near-optimal pilot configuration. Simulation results show that the proposed PSP-SVT scheme outperforms existing full superimposed pilot-aided SVT schemes in terms of BLER with fast convergence speed.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

ST-DDA: Dynamic Channel Estimation in the Doppler-Delay-Angle Domain via Sparse Subspace Tracking for TDD Systems

Accurate full-band channel acquisition in frequency-hopping time-division duplex (TDD) systems is challenging because each sounding slot observes only a limited frequency subband, while conventional single-slot recovery cannot fully exploit historical observations. We propose ST-DDA, an online sparse-subspace tracking framework for latest-slot reconstruction in the Doppler--delay--angle (DDA) domain. We first show that the Doppler-domain representation remains energy-concentrated under moderate channel variation, thereby supporting windowed DDA-domain sparse recovery. A local stability analysis further shows that the substantial overlap between adjacent windows enables the preceding-window estimate to warm-start each window-specific recovery problem, allowing the optimization progress to be carried across slots under a fixed per-slot iteration budget. For computational tractability, ST-DDA employs the alternating subspace method, which restricts the regularized least-squares fidelity updates to support-induced subspaces, together with position-encoded convolutional reweighting that exploits local angular and Doppler structures. Experiments show that reweighted ST-DDA achieves more accurate and reliable reconstruction than dynamic compressed-sensing baselines, particularly for longer sounding intervals and larger frequency-hopping periods, while maintaining comparable per-slot runtime.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Dual-Mapping Sparse Vector Coding for Phase Noise-Resilient Short-Packet Transmission

Sparse vector transmission (SVT) has emerged as a promising technique for ultra-reliable low-latency short-packet communications. However, existing SVT schemes typically assume negligible phase noise (PN), an assumption that rarely holds in practical wireless systems. In this paper, a dual-mapping sparse vector coding (DM-SVC) scheme is proposed for short-packet communications subject to PN. In DM-SVC, pilot symbols are mapped onto multiple non-zero blocks and data symbols onto isolated non-zero elements within a single sparse vector, thereby enabling pilot-data separation through distinct sparsity patterns rather than explicit resource partitioning. Moreover, the indices of pilot blocks convey additional information bits, further improving spectral efficiency. A basis expansion model is adopted to represent the PN process, substantially reducing the number of parameters to be estimated. Furthermore, an iterative joint PN estimation and data decoding algorithm is developed, where pilot block indices are first detected exploiting block-sparse priors, after which PN estimation and data decoding proceed iteratively. Simulation results show that DM-SVC could achieve block error rate performance close to that of perfect PN compensation, while offering improved spectral efficiency and reduced codebook storage overhead compared to state-of-the-art SVT schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

DDA-Net: Accurate TDD Channel Estimation via Deep Unfolding the Doppler-Delay-Angle Representation of Channel Signals

In TDD massive MIMO systems, channel estimation under sparse frequency-hopping pilots is challenging: each snapshot captures only one narrow pilot block that hops across frequency, with tens of milliseconds between adjacent snapshots. Finite-window leakage and off-grid effects weaken the ideal Doppler-delay-angle (DDA) sparsity, limiting both classical sparse recovery and purely data-driven approaches lacking an explicit structured transform-domain model. We propose DDA-Net, a model-driven 3D deep unfolding network for joint multi-snapshot channel state reconstruction. DDA-Net integrates an ADMM-based formulation with a closed-form data-consistency update that avoids tensor inversion, a lightweight Doppler-domain learned prior, and delay oversampling to mitigate basis mismatch. It consistently outperforms strong baselines across three channel settings from 3GPP TR 38.901: UMa-NLOS, UMi-NLOS, and CDL-B. Ablations confirm that window-level 3D processing and explicit Doppler modeling yield target-dependent improvements. With minimal target-domain fine-tuning, the UMa-pretrained model surpasses both its zero-shot version and counterparts trained from scratch with the same number of target-domain samples. The Doppler-domain design proves consistently superior to its time-domain equivalent, with a wider margin after fine-tuning. These results demonstrate that combining exact physical data consistency with a learned DDA-domain prior is an effective and sample-efficient approach to channel state acquisition under sparse frequency-hopping pilots.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Covering-radius and Collinearity- Minimizing Pilots for Channel Estimation in TDD Systems

This letter studies pilot design for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing-based time-division duplex (TDD) systems under a sliding-window latest-slot recovery framework that jointly exploits delay-Doppler sparsity across recent slots. Under contiguous-subband and fairness constraints, this viewpoint naturally leads to a geometry-aware time-frequency joint pilot assignment. We show that effective patterns should balance grid coverage and redundant-collinearity suppression, with an additional symmetry-avoidance refinement when complete collinearity elimination is infeasible. Based on these principles, we formulate a mixed-integer construction method compatible with practical TDD allocation. Numerical results show that minimum-coverage-radius and collinearity-control (MCC) pattern improves both surrogate geometry metrics and latest-slot recovery performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Toward Robust Semantic Communications: Proactive Importance-Ordered Restructuring for Enhanced Unequal Error Protection

Semantic communications (SemCom) is a promising task-oriented paradigm in which semantic features exhibit non-uniform importance. Consequently, unequal error protection (UEP), which allocates resources based on semantic importance, plays a pivotal role in maximizing system utility. However, most existing schemes adopt passive importance evaluation, which neither proactively reshapes the importance distribution nor explores its impact on UEP performance. In this paper, we propose a novel importance-ordered semantic feature restructuring (ISFR) scheme that proactively enforces a descending importance hierarchy and jointly optimizes multi-dimensional resources to improve system utility. Specifically, modules with decreasing retention probabilities and increasing distortion levels are employed, which drive the model to concentrate key semantics into front-end features and thus strengthen importance differentiation. Moreover, a joint optimization problem that jointly optimizes channel matching, feature selection, modulation schemes, and power allocation is formulated to minimize the importance-weighted total semantic distortion. To solve this non-convex problem, a hierarchical decoupling strategy is proposed, which decomposes it into four tractable subproblems. This approach leverages the ordered prior to drastically prune the search space for feature selection and modulation, while integrating greedy-based channel matching and convex power allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ISFR scheme outperforms traditional uniform importance-based schemes under harsh channel conditions and limited resources, validating the significant robustness improvement enabled by the concentration of key semantic information.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Single-Pulse Study of the Pseudo-nulling Pulsar PSR J1820-0509 Based on FAST Observations

Using two observations obtained with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), we present a detailed single-pulse analysis of the high-nulling pulsar PSR J1820-0509. We measure an exceptionally high nulling fraction of approximately 81.78%, significantly exceeding previous estimates from Parkes observations. The single-pulse energy distribution exhibits a clear bimodal structure, consistent with classical nulling behavior. However, stacking the identified null pulses reveals a statistically significant residual profile above the noise level, indicating that the nulls correspond to a very weak emission state rather than a complete cessation of radio emission. The pulsar shows clustered burst activities spanning several hundred rotation periods, with prominent quasi-periodicities at 1191 +/- 81 and 590 +/- 15 pulse periods in the two observations. Based on temporal clustering and integrated profile morphology, we identify three distinct emission modes (A, B, and C) and a pseudo-null state (D). These modes exhibit systematic differences in pulse morphology, polarization, and energy statistics. The pulse width-energy relations reveal clear transitions between low- and high-energy regimes. The energy distributions of Modes A and C are well described by lognormal functions, while Mode B follows a composite Gaussian-lognormal distribution. These results suggest that the radio emission of PSR J1820-0509 is governed by multiple quasi-stable magnetospheric states. The presence of weak emission during pseudo-nulls, together with systematic mode-dependent variations, supports the interpretation that pulsar nulling reflects transitions between different magnetospheric activity levels rather than a complete shutdown of emission.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2026

Language-Conditioned World Modeling for Visual Navigation

We study language-conditioned visual navigation (LCVN), in which an embodied agent is asked to follow a natural language instruction based only on an initial egocentric observation. Without access to goal images, the agent must rely on language to shape its perception and continuous control, making the grounding problem particularly challenging. We formulate this problem as open-loop trajectory prediction conditioned on linguistic instructions and introduce the LCVN Dataset, a benchmark of 39,016 trajectories and 117,048 human-verified instructions that supports reproducible research across a range of environments and instruction styles. Using this dataset, we develop LCVN frameworks that link language grounding, future-state prediction, and action generation through two complementary model families. The first family combines LCVN-WM, a diffusion-based world model, with LCVN-AC, an actor-critic agent trained in the latent space of the world model. The second family, LCVN-Uni, adopts an autoregressive multimodal architecture that predicts both actions and future observations. Experiments show that these families offer different advantages: the former provides more temporally coherent rollouts, whereas the latter generalizes better to unseen environments. Taken together, these observations point to the value of jointly studying language grounding, imagination, and policy learning in a unified task setting, and LCVN provides a concrete basis for further investigation of language-conditioned world models. The code is available at https://github.com/F1y1113/LCVN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Overlap-Summation-Based Pulse Shaping Transceiver for Affine Frequency Division Multiplexing

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) has recently emerged as a promising waveform for doubly-selective channels. A direct-windowing-based pulse shaping transceiver (PS-AFDM) was proposed to suppress the Doppler sidelobes, thus improving the accuracy of channel estimation. We observe that the legacy PS-AFDM significantly increases the condition number of the effective channel matrix when path delay and Doppler parameters are randomly distributed, such ill-conditioning leads to the degradation in the solution stability of channel equalization under noisy conditions, thus resulting in the degradation of bit error rate (BER). To address this issue, this letter applies the existing weighted overlap-summation (WOLA) transceiver to AFDM and proposes a novel channel-aware (CA) receive shaping window design, which simultaneously achieves accurate channel estimation and robust equalization performance, at the cost of time-domain prefix and receive window calculation overheads. The resulting scheme is termed CAWOLA-AFDM. Compared with the legacy WOLA scheme, which employs a fixed receive window, the proposed CAWOLA design exploits the non-instantaneous channel estimates of power gains and Doppler shifts to design a channel-tailored and closed-form receive shaping window, thereby further enhancing channel estimation accuracy while maintaining the channel condition number when a Nyquist prototype window is adopted. The proposed CAWOLA receive window design aims to provide the effective AFDM channel with a more compact DAFT-domain support. The source codes for the simulations are provided at https://github.com/SANIS-HITSZ/Waveform_AFDM.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Dual-Mapping Sparse Vector Transmission for Short Packet URLLC

Sparse vector coding (SVC) is a promising short-packet transmission method for ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) in next generation communication systems. In this paper, a dual-mapping SVC (DM-SVC) based short packet transmission scheme is proposed to further enhance the transmission performance of SVC. The core idea behind the proposed scheme lies in mapping the transmitted information bits onto sparse vectors via block and single-element sparse mappings. The block sparse mapping pattern is able to concentrate the transmit power in a small number of non-zero blocks thus improving the decoding accuracy, while the single-element sparse mapping pattern ensures that the code length does not increase dramatically with the number of transmitted information bits. At the receiver, a two-stage decoding algorithm is proposed to sequentially identify non-zero block indexes and single-element non-zero indexes. Extensive simulation results verify that proposed DM-SVC scheme outperforms the existing SVC schemes in terms of block error rate and spectral efficiency.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Low-Complexity Sparse Superimposed Coding for Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications

Sparse superimposed coding (SSC) has emerged as a promising technique for short-packet transmission in ultra-reliable low-latency communication scenarios. However, conventional SSC schemes often suffer from high encoding and decoding complexity due to the use of dense codebook matrices. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity SSC scheme by designing a sparse codebook structure, where each codeword contains only a small number of non-zero elements. The decoding is performed using the traditional multipath matching pursuit algorithm, and the overall complexity is significantly reduced by exploiting the sparsity of the codebook. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a favorable trade-off between BLER performance and computational complexity, and exhibits strong robustness across different transmission block lengths.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Hierarchical Sparse Vector Transmission for Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications

Sparse vector transmission (SVT) is a promising candidate technology for achieving ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). In this paper, a hierarchical SVT scheme is proposed for multi-user URLLC scenarios. The hierarchical SVT scheme partitions the transmitted bits into common and private parts. The common information is conveyed by the indices of non-zero sections in a sparse vector, while each user's private information is embedded into non-zero blocks with specific block lengths. At the receiver, the common bits are first recovered from the detected non-zero sections, followed by user-specific private bits decoding based on the corresponding non-zero block indices. Simulation results show the proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art SVT schemes in terms of block error rate.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

OMUDA: Omni-level Masking for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables semantic segmentation models to generalize from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, existing UDA methods still struggle to bridge the domain gap due to cross-domain contextual ambiguity, inconsistent feature representations, and class-wise pseudo-label noise. To address these challenges, we propose Omni-level Masking for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (OMUDA), a unified framework that introduces hierarchical masking strategies across distinct representation levels. Specifically, OMUDA comprises: 1) a Context-Aware Masking (CAM) strategy that adaptively distinguishes foreground from background to balance global context and local details; 2) a Feature Distillation Masking (FDM) strategy that enhances robust and consistent feature learning through knowledge transfer from pre-trained models; and 3) a Class Decoupling Masking (CDM) strategy that mitigates the impact of noisy pseudo-labels by explicitly modeling class-wise uncertainty. This hierarchical masking paradigm effectively reduces the domain shift at the contextual, representational, and categorical levels, providing a unified solution beyond existing approaches. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging cross-domain semantic segmentation benchmarks validate the effectiveness of OMUDA. Notably, on the SYNTHIA->Cityscapes and GTA5->Cityscapes tasks, OMUDA can be seamlessly integrated into existing UDA methods and consistently achieving state-of-the-art results with an average improvement of 7%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Conditional stability for an inverse problem of a fully-discrete stochastic hyperbolic equation

In this paper, we investigate a discrete inverse problem of determining three unknowns, i.e. initial displacement, initial velocity and random source term, in a fully discrete approximation of one-dimensional stochastic hyperbolic equation. We firstly prove a new Carleman estimate for the fully-discrete stochastic hyperbolic equation. Based on this Carleman estimate, we then establish a Lipschitz stability for this discrete inverse problem by the discrete spatial derivative data at the left endpoint and the measurements of the solution and its time derivative at the final time. Owing to the discrete setting, an extra term with respect to mesh size arises in the right-hand side of the stability estimate.

math.AP↗

arXiv2025

Study on Improving Microwave Heating Uniformity Based on Phase-Frequency Simultaneous Modulation Technique

Conventional microwave heating techniques are limited due to inherent thermal point residency effects and inadequate control over the heating process. A novel method is proposed to enhance microwave heating uniformity using the injection-pulling technique. In this method, the injection-pulling technique is used to achieve simultaneous modulation of both the output phase and frequency of the magnetron, thereby extending the locking bandwidth of the injection-locking technique. The output characteristics of the injection-pulled magnetron were validated through numerical calculations and experiments. Microwave heating experiments were conducted under both a five-cup water load and an absorbent paper load. Compared with conventional injection-locking frequency sweeping, the proposed method not only expands the sweeping bandwidth from 8 to 18 MHz but also further improves heating uniformity, offering more options for magnetron applications in microwave heating.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2025

High-Efficiency Isolator-Free Magnetron Power Combining Method Based on H-Plane Tee Coupling and Peer-to-Peer Locking

Magnetrons are widely used as high-performance microwave sources in microwave heating, microwave chemistry, and microwave power transmission due to their high efficiency, low cost, and compact size advantages. However, the output power of a single magnetron is limited by its resonant cavities, posing a physical constraint. High-efficiency coherent power combining based on the injection-locking technique effectively overcomes this limitation and meets the demand for higher output power. Nevertheless, using isolators, such as circulators, introduces significant insertion loss, and the injection signal sources and phase shifters increase the system size, cost, and complexity in a conventional magnetron power combining (MPC) system. A novel method is proposed to utilize the coupling between two ports of an H-plane tee to achieve peer-to-peer injection locking magnetrons. Meanwhile, an asymmetric phase compensation is realized using a section of waveguide to adjust the magnetron output characteristics. Theoretical and numerical analyses provided qualitative insight into the system output behavior. Subsequently, an experimental system was developed for verification. In the experiments, the system achieved maximum microwave power combining efficiencies 90.2%, 93.6%, and 93.6% at electrical waveguide lengths corresponding to 90, 135, and 225, with output powers of 1650, 1260, and 1610 W, respectively, without the use of any isolators or external injection sources. The experimental results show good agreement with numerical calculations. This method offers the advantages of low cost, compact size, and low loss, providing a new approach for developing high-performance MPC systems in the future.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2025

Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresight

Enabling embodied agents to imagine future states is essential for robust and generalizable visual navigation. Yet, state-of-the-art systems typically rely on modular designs that decouple navigation planning from visual world modeling, which often induces state-action misalignment and weak adaptability in novel or dynamic scenarios. We propose UniWM, a unified, memory-augmented world model that integrates egocentric visual foresight and planning within a single multimodal autoregressive backbone. UniWM explicitly grounds action selection in visually imagined outcomes, tightly aligning prediction with control. Meanwhile, a hierarchical memory mechanism fuses short-term perceptual cues with longer-term trajectory context, supporting stable and coherent reasoning over extended horizons. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks (Go Stanford, ReCon, SCAND, HuRoN) and the 1X Humanoid Dataset show that UniWM improves navigation success rates by up to 30%, substantially reduces trajectory errors against strong baselines, generalizes zero-shot to the unseen TartanDrive dataset, and scales naturally to high-dimensional humanoid navigation. These results position UniWM as a principled step toward unified, imagination-driven embodied navigation. The code and models are available at https://github.com/UWMILab/UniWM.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Unraveling longitudinal field mediated versatile Stokes polarimetry

Stokes polarimetry has been considered as an alluring platform that enables a plethora of applications ranging from single-molecule orientation to deep-space sensing. Existing polarimetry avenues, however, rely primarily on the transversely polarized field reconstruction, thus suffering from several challenges such as multiple time sequenced detections, complex demodulation algorithms, and intricate engineering procedures. To circumvent these challenges, here we first demonstrate a longitudinally polarized field mediated recipe for the realization of efficacious and refined Stokes polarimetry in situ. This is achieved by unraveling the spin-to-orbit momentum conversion under non-paraxial focusing conditions enabling the direct mapping of the polarization ellipse. Leveraging this mechanism, we reveal an analytical solution of polarization ellipse via the local sampling of longitudinal field, in which the robustness can be fairly reinforced by relevant global retrieval based on convolutional neural network. The resultant Stokes polarimetry is shown to simultaneously exhibit in-situ signal acquisition (direct discernment), unparalleled demodulation time (up tomicrosecond level), superior detection efficiency (no need of troublesome design), and ultra-high retrieved accuracy (less than 1%), which is fundamentally inaccessible with traditional polarimetry methods. Our work holds great promise for empowering an allin-one versatile vector polarimeter, which opens up a host of applications relevant to polarization control.

physics.optics↗