Beamforming

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3 papers in the last 28 days · 0.0% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-14

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Beamforming.

Period ending 2026-09-07

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Beamforming.

34 papers

Latest in Beamforming

Sep 11, 2026eess.AS

Domain-Incremental Learning for Multi-Channel Replay Speech Detection

Replay attacks are the most accessible threat to voice-controlled systems, and the acoustic cues that expose them are strongly modulated by the environment in which the attack is mounted. A detector deployed in the field therefore has to absorb new acoustic conditions over time, ideally without revisiting past recordings, since retaining speech indefinitely is both expensive and legally constrained. We frame this as Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) over acoustic environments and present the first continual learning benchmark for multi-channel replay speech detection, evaluating a state-of-the-art beamformer-based detector over all 24 environment orderings of the ReMASC corpus with five seeds. Sequential fine-tuning forgets severely, raising the error rate on previously learned environments by 18.8 points. Elastic weight consolidation (EWC) halves forgetting but loses plasticity, gradient projection memory (GPM) is statistically indistinguishable from naive fine-tuning, and the proposed task-specific beamformer (TSB) that keeps one spatial front-end per environment significantly improves final and incremental accuracy. We further show that the last environment of the sequence dominates final performance. Code, results, and analysis are available at https://github.com/michaelneri/replay-speech-continual.
Michael Neri
Sep 9, 2026eess.SP

Efficient Graph Neural Networks for Multicarrier Wideband Hybrid Beamforming Optimization

6G wireless technology is poised to adopt higher and wider frequency bands, leveraging highly directional beamforming. However, the vast bandwidths amplify the impact of beam squinting. Traditional solutions, such as adding a true-time-delay filter to each antenna, are cost-prohibitive due to the required hardware scale. This paper proposes a signal processing alternative using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to optimize hybrid beamforming in multicarrier wideband systems. Using a bipartite graph to represent a shared analog beamformer among multiple subcarriers, we develop three GNN structures with distinct digital beamformer representations (i) at the subcarrier nodes, (ii) at the edges, or (iii) integrating traditional singular-value decomposition solutions. By designing an efficient message-passing mechanism, these structures offer insights into the impact of different GNN designs on communication system performance and computational complexity. Extensive analysis and ablation studies show that our proposed GNN structures outperform traditional optimization methods and existing ML-based solutions. Furthermore, the proposed GNNs exhibit strong resiliency to beam squinting and better robustness against imperfect CSI than even fully digital beamforming and all existing hybrid designs. These GNNs can also be extended to multi-user scenarios and demonstrate excellent generalization capabilities, allowing trained models to adapt to diverse multicarrier and multi-user settings without retraining.
Beier Li, Mai Vu
Aug 31, 2026eess.SP

Beamforming Design Via GNN in mmWave Cell-Free Massive MIMO Using Sub-6 GHz CSI

Beamforming methods in millimeter-wave (mmWave) cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) systems require accurate channel state information (CSI), whose acquisition entails significant training overhead. This paper shows that fully digital cell-free mmWave beamforming can be effectively learned from sub-6 GHz CSI using a graph neural network (GNN). Specifically, we represent a CFmMIMO system as a wireless graph, and the GNN is trained to approximate beamformers that maximize the downlink sum-rate based on the available sub-6 GHz CSI. A message-passing mechanism is proposed to capture inter-user interference and inter-base-station cooperation across different network topologies. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed sub-6 GHz-assisted GNN-based beamformer achieves competitive and often superior sum-rate performance compared to classical baselines that rely on full mmWave CSI.
Sina Tavakolian, Abolfazl Zakeri, Ahmed Alkhateeb +2
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

Multi-perspective Imbalance-Conscious 6G Beamforming Optimization and Performance

The study presents a systematic machine learning (ML) study of 6G-IoT beamforming optimization (6GBO) using supervised and unsupervised approaches. We compared the predictive power of network, environmental, device, and vision feature groups for 6GBO. Additionally, it addressed other unsupervised perspectives that can enhance 6GBO, including clustering network scenarios using methods such as K-means, DBSCAN, and hierarchical clustering. Several imbalance-aware experiments revealed that network features possess better prediction power than device, environmental, and vision feature groups, as evidenced by their recall, F1-score and ROC-AUC values. For unsupervised ML exploration (assessed using Elbow, Silhouette score, and Davies-Bouldin Index methods), the results indicate that the deployment environment and type of device primarily influence clustering, rather than mobility-based attributes. Furthermore, the explainability analysis showed that bandwidth, IoT sensors, and mobility possess higher global feature importance across the feature groups. In the future, we would apply deep and reinforcement learning techniques to predict throughput/latency or to optimize rewards determined by performance indicators like SNR enhancement
Chukwunonso Henry Nwokoye, Blessing Oluchi Iloka, Chikwue V. Umeugoji +2
Aug 7, 2026cs.SD

Cloud-Boosted Low-Compute Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement

Low-latency, low-compute speech enhancement is essential for wearable devices with real-time communication requirements, but strict computational constraints significantly limit on-device performance. Knowledge Boosting has been proposed as an effective approach to improve edge model performance by leveraging a more capable server-side model, but performance gains for speech enhancement have been limited. We propose a collaborative framework incorporating three techniques: (1) delayed server output as additional input, (2) layerwise feature boosting that transfers intermediate server representations to guide edge inference, and (3) collaborative multichannel Wiener filtering, which fuses weighted covariance matrices estimated from both server and edge models for improved beamforming. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative framework significantly outperforms the edge-only baseline with minimal additional computational overhead.
Xulin Fan, Juan Azcarreta, Ashutosh Pandey +5
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

GSBF: Gaussian Splatting for Environment-Aware Beamforming

Beamforming plays a key role in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. However, conventional beamforming design normally requires accurate instantaneous channel state information (CSI) and iterative optimization, which incur substantial pilot overhead and computational complexity. Recognizing that radio propagation is intrinsically governed by the physical geometry, we develop a 3D Gaussian splatting for environment-aware beamforming (GSBF) pipeline based on multi-modal data, which characterizes the environment through a persistent 3D Gaussian representation. Specifically, GSBF models the environmental scattering response with reciprocity-preserving bidirectional spherical Gaussian (Bi-SG) kernels and performs two-sided electromagnetic rasterization to render an angular propagator map. The rendered map is then aggregated through an over-complete array-manifold dictionary and projected to the constant-modulus beamformers, thereby synthesizing beams directly from the access point (AP) pose and user position without online instantaneous CSI. Simulations demonstrate that GSBF consistently outperforms baselines such as exhaustive beam alignment (EBA) with lower latency.
Yijie Bian, Wei Guo, Zixin Wang +3
Jul 21, 2026cs.IT

CRB-Driven Beamforming and Trajectory Optimization for UAV-assisted ISAC System

In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a UAV enhances the sensing capability of a base station (BS) towards a target while ensuring reliable communication towards a downlink user. This architecture is practically attractive for future wireless networks due to the UAV's controllable mobility and adaptive sensing coverage in wireless environments. The sensing performance is characterized by the average Cramér-Rao bound (CRB), which quantifies the minimum variance of the unbiased angle-of-arrival estimation. To enhance the sensing performance, the UAV trajectory and beamforming parameters are jointly optimized under power and mobility constraints, while satisfying communication requirements to the downlink user. To address the resulting non-convex problem, we employ null-space projection for beamforming design and adopt deep reinforcement learning for the trajectory optimization over a discrete-time scale. In each time slot, beamforming is optimized based on the channel state information to improve CRB performance while mitigating interference between the BS and the communication user. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the time-averaged CRB by over 10%, compared with the ISAC system without UAV assistance, and also achieves a higher sensing accuracy than both the fixed-UAV-trajectory and the maximum-ratio-transmission-based beamforming benchmarks.
Yi Yang, Qianqian Zhang, Huaxia Wang
Jul 14, 2026cs.IT

Robust Design of Integrated Sensing and Communication in LEO Satellite Systems

With the growing demand for satellite sensing and communication, the limited wireless resources are difficult to support multiple satellite systems. Therefore, it is desired to investigate integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems to enable multi-functionality within a single satellite, thereby saving both spectrum and orbital resources. In this paper, a framework for ISAC in LEO satellite systems is established, where a satellite can simultaneously sense multiple targets and serve multiple communication users (CUs) over the same spectrum. Considering the limited onboard energy of satellite, a novel robust beamforming design algorithm is developed with the goal of minimizing total transmit power while satisfying the mean squared error (MSE) requirements for sensing and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements for communication in presence of channel phase uncertainty which exacerbates the cross-functional interference. According to theoretical analysis, the proposed algorithm for ISAC in LEO satellite systems is effective. Moreover, extensive simulations confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm over baselines.
Hezhen Yang, Xiaoming Chen, Qi Wang
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Self-Evolving In-Context Learning for Direct Pilot-to-Beamformer Design in MU-MISO Systems

We develop an enhanced in-context learning (ICL) framework to improve the performance of pilot-based beamforming in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. The proposed scheme integrates the ICL-Transformer backbone with the pilot encoder-decoder network (EDN) and the beamformer EDN. A crucial feature of our ICL network is that it can handle multiple channel models without retraining, enabled by the construction of model-specific context datasets. To improve convergence and robustness, we introduce three key innovations: (a) a curriculum learning (CL) strategy that smoothly transitions from supervised LMMSE-labeled imitation to unsupervised sum-rate maximization, (b) a self-evolving mechanism that dynamically expands and refines the context datasets for all channel models during CL-based training, and (c) a mismatch-aware extension that incorporates several mismatches into the general ICL framework and bypasses explicit channel calibrations. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the in-context architecture and enhanced training strategies. Simulation results over diverse communication environments show that the proposed scheme is able to rapidly adapt to both seen and unseen channel models without gradient-based parameter updates, and can mitigate the mismatch issues via intelligent context constructions. Furthermore, our scheme consistently outperforms the existing beamforming schemes under pilot-based settings, including the WMMSE benchmark and the recent Transformer-based methods.
Yubo Zhang, Xiaodong Wang
Jul 9, 2026cs.NI

Spatio-Temporal Scheduling Prediction Under Backhaul Delay for Resilient Coordinated Beamforming

Coordinated beamforming in distributed 5G networks relies on the timely exchange of inter-cell scheduling information, but backhaul latency makes this information stale. Even a single transmission time interval (TTI) of delay can reduce CBF-SLNR performance below the uncoordinated baseline, because the precoder suppresses interference toward users that are no longer active. Coordination on stale information is therefore worse than no coordination at all. To address this, we propose a two-stage predictive framework in which a Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network (StemGNN) predicts future user equipment (UE) scheduling states from delayed historical observations, and the predictions replace stale inputs to the CBF-SLNR precoder. Evaluated on a three-cell massive MIMO downlink with 60 UEs and 64 antennas per base station under Quadriga Urban Micro (UMi) channels and a proportional fair scheduler, StemGNN achieves a mean scheduling prediction accuracy of 87.57%, outperforming LSTM, GRU, Simple RNN, and Markov chain baselines at all evaluated horizons, with gains of up to 7.71% over LSTM at longer horizons where inter-UE structural dependencies dominate over temporal autocorrelation. When integrated into coordinated beamforming, the predictions recover 57-73% of the sum rate loss caused by one TTI of backhaul delay, improving sum rate by 9.58-14.35% over the no-prediction baseline and recovering up to 83% of the Lag-1 fairness loss for cell-edge users, with fairness gains persisting at higher lag values where throughput gains diminish. These results show that treating backhaul latency as a spatio-temporal forecasting problem is an effective approach for robust inter-cell coordination in delay-constrained networks.
Prashant Kumar Singh, Shubham Vaishnav, Ahmet Hasim Gökceoglu +1
Jul 7, 2026cs.IT

AirPASS: Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems

This paper investigates over-the-air federated learning (AirFL) in wireless systems where the access point is equipped with a multi-waveguide pinching antenna system (PASS). We adopt the widely studied learning-oriented AirFL formulation, which seeks to maximize the number of selected devices while keeping the aggregation distortion below a prescribed threshold. The resulting joint optimization of device selection, receive beamforming, and pinching-antenna placement is highly nonconvex due to the intricate coupling among these system variables. To address this challenge, we develop AirPASS, an alternating optimization framework with two main components: a homotopy-Riemannian margin-consolidation method for device selection and receive beamforming under fixed PASS configuration, and a homotopy-assisted geometry optimization method for updating the pinching-antenna positions under fixed selected devices and beamformer. Experiments show that AirPASS consistently outperforms conventional co-located MIMO baselines, remains close to ideal FedAvg, and achieves an attractive performance-complexity tradeoff relative to SDR-DC and matching-pursuit scheduling alternatives.
Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi, Christopher G. Brinton
Jul 7, 2026cs.IT

6G Sensing Security: Distributed Game-Theoretic RL for Urban Beamforming and Attacker Detection

In next-generation networks, communication systems will no longer be limited to data transmission and will be expected to acquire awareness of the surrounding environment. This leads to the concept of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), where the same wireless infrastructure is used for both communication and environmental sensing. Thus, ISAC enables the system to transmit information efficiently and observe and interpret channel variations and user behavior. Motivated by this capability, this work focuses on detecting an active attacker in an urban environment scenario, where the attacker intentionally manipulates beamforming directions to increase interference and mislead the transmitter into allocating the main lobe of beam toward itself instead of legitimate users. We apply game-theoretic approaches to model the interaction between legitimate users and the attacker, and integrate the resulting utility-based formulation into a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses security challenges in dynamic 6G ISAC systems.
Parmida Geranmayeh, Onur Günlü
Jul 5, 2026eess.AS

Weakly Guided and Autoregressive Beamformer Parameterization for Generalizable Moving Speaker Extraction in Higher-Order Ambisonics

Linear spatial filters (beamformers) enable robust, generalizable and interpretable speech enhancement with performance guarantees under ideal parameterization. Modern beamformers are often parameterized by deep neural networks, whose performance degrades in dynamic scenarios with multiple moving speakers of unknown directions. We propose a data-driven beamforming pipeline, which only requires an estimate of the target's initial direction. Building on a higher-order ambisonics representation, we show that neural temporal-spectral processing can be decoupled from linear spatial processing, and thereby achieve generalizable and array-agnostic enhancement. By incorporating autoregression into a frame-wise causal framework, we maintain consistent performance throughout fast speaker motion and long recordings. Evaluation on synthetic data demonstrates robust enhancement under challenging conditions with closely spaced and crossing speakers. Real-world recordings in a dynamic office meeting scenario complement these findings and show generalizability across varying ambisonics orders.
Jakob Kienegger, Tal Peer, Sina Khanagha +1
Jul 5, 2026cs.LG

Channel-Adaptive Robust Aggregation for Over-the-Air Federated Learning in Heterogeneous Networks

The growing demand for privacy-preserving, data-intensive applications such as IoT, augmented reality, and autonomous systems positions Federated Learning (FL) as a key enabler in 6G networks. Over-the-Air FL (OTA-FL) leverages the superposition property of the wireless multiple access channel for efficient aggregation via simultaneous transmissions. Existing methods rely on fixed aggregation schedules and do not jointly address noise, fading, and client heterogeneity. We propose CHARGE-FL (CHannel-Adaptive Robust agGrEgation), a framework that adaptively schedules aggregation based on channel dynamics and application readiness. By combining a tailored optimization strategy with a dual-purpose precoding mechanism, CHARGE-FL mitigates channel distortion and bias from partial updates, achieving superior accuracy, stability, and convergence under realistic wireless conditions. Empirical results under realistic wireless conditions show that CHARGE-FL significantly improves accuracy, stability, and convergence over state-of-the-art OTA-FL methods, particularly in straggler-prone and noisy scenarios.
Zubaida Fatima, Zubair Shaban, Yusuf Jamal +3
Jul 1, 2026cs.IT

QuaMoE-DRF: Proactive Beam and Rate Adaptation via Multimodal Dynamic Radio Map Forecasting in ISAC Networks

Static radio maps provide location-dependent propagation priors, but they cannot capture short-term blockage caused by moving objects. Direct sensing-assisted beam prediction is also limited because a beam index discards SINR margins, MCS thresholds, BS alternatives, and communication-equivalent neighboring beams. This paper proposes QuaMoE-DRF, a quality-aware multimodal dynamic radio map forecasting framework for proactive beam and rate adaptation in ISAC networks. Its core representation is a future beam-SINR field. We show that the full multi-BS beam-SINR field is sufficient for finite-codebook threshold-rate BS, beam, MCS, goodput, and outage decisions. For tractability, the implemented model learns a compact reference-BS local field, complemented by BS-level supervision, joint BS--beam supervision, and latent network context; we also clarify that this compact projection alone is not sufficient for BS association. QuaMoE-DRF fuses static geometry, event-like motion observations, structured sensing states, and wireless history through a quality-aware mixture-of-experts module motivated by inverse-variance fusion under heteroscedastic modality errors. It jointly predicts communication-oriented map channels and proactive BS, beam, and MCS decisions. On a dynamic multi-BS and multi-UE urban benchmark, QuaMoE-DRF achieves 402.5 Mbps effective rate, 0.0417 outage probability, and 0.1836 map RMSE, improving the effective rate by 5.67% and reducing outage by 8.35% over the strongest completed effective-rate baseline. The current validation uses labels from a compact blockage/path-loss simulator, with ray tracing used only for calibration and sanity checking.
Zhihan Zeng, Kaihe Wang, Zhongpei Zhang +1
Jul 1, 2026eess.SP

Meta-Transfer Learning for mmWave Beam Alignment

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam alignment plays a critical role in next-generation wireless systems, yet its efficient implementation remains challenging. Meta-learning and transfer learning have been explored to enable deep learning-based beam prediction models to rapidly adapt to unseen environments; however, existing meta-learning approaches adapt the entire network and are trained from random initialization, leading to a large number of updated parameters and a high meta-training cost, while transfer learning approaches restrict adaptation to part of the network but do not exploit episodic meta-learning, which explicitly trains the model over multiple tasks, to optimize the adaptation process itself. To overcome these limitations, we propose MTL-BA, a meta-transfer learning framework for beam alignment in millimeter-wave multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems that freezes a pre-trained convolutional backbone and meta-learns only lightweight Scale-and-Shift (SS) adapters together with a classifier head. Warm-starting from the pre-trained model and restricting adaptation to the SS adapters and classifier head reduce both the adaptation cost and the meta-training budget without sacrificing prediction performance. Simulation results on the DeepMIMO ray-tracing dataset show that MTL-BA matches the accuracy and spectral efficiency of full fine-tuning across various SNR levels despite updating approximately 17×17\times fewer parameters than both full fine-tuning and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), outperforms last-layer fine-tuning while updating a comparable number of parameters, and approaches MAML's performance while requiring 60%60\% fewer meta-training epochs.
Ahmet Nuri Cevik, Sinem Coleri
Jun 23, 2026eess.AS

Joint Learning of Covariance Estimation and White Noise Gain for Robust MVDR Beamforming

The minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer is widely used for multichannel speech enhancement due to strong noise suppression while preserving target signals. In practice, its performance is sensitive to microphone self-noise and array mismatches. Existing approaches typically rely on fixed, manually tuned WNG thresholds or diagonal loading, leading to suboptimal performance under unknown or time-varying acoustic conditions. This paper proposes a data-driven MVDR framework that adaptively estimates the WNG constraint using a deep neural network. The network jointly predicts a time-frequency noise mask for covariance estimation and a frequency-dependent WNG threshold, enabling dynamic robustness-directivity control. A differentiable robust MVDR layer is integrated into the framework, allowing end-to-end optimization. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in speech quality and intelligibility over conventional fixed-WNG MVDR methods.
Yongyi Deng, Hanchen Pei, Jianbo Ma +3
Jun 15, 2026eess.SP

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.
Marco Skocaj, Lukas Eller, Mate Boban
Jun 7, 2026eess.SP

A Switching Beamformer for Highly Non-Stationary Environments

Adaptive beamforming is a cornerstone of array signal processing, yet its performance often collapses in the face of complex, rapidly changing interference. When interferers appear or move unpredictably, conventional estimators encounter a fundamental memory trade-off: short windows enable rapid tracking but suffer from high estimation variance, while long windows provide stable rejection but fail to adapt to shifts. This challenge is resolved by introducing the Universal Switching Beamformer (USB), which integrates competitive sequential prediction into the beamforming architecture. By employing a linear transition diagram, the USB implicitly maintains an exponentially large family of candidate covariance histories and dynamically re-weights them based on their cumulative output power. This mechanism allows the beamformer to automatically vary its effective memory length without explicit change detection or heuristic parameter tuning. A theoretical upper bound is proven on the regret relative to an omniscient oracle that selects the best piecewise-stationary covariance model in hindsight. Extensive simulations and experiments on the SwellEx-96 dataset demonstrate that the USB achieves the agility of short-window estimators and the precision of long-term integration, providing a principled solution for tracking highly non-stationary scenes.
Manan Mittal, Ryan M. Corey, John R. Buck +1
Jun 3, 2026cs.SD

SHB-AE: Spherical harmonic beamforming based Ambisonics encoding and upscaling method for smartphone microphone array

With the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), spatial audio recording and reproduction have gained increasing research interest. Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA) stands out for its adaptability to various playback devices and its ability to integrate head orientation. However, current HOA recordings often rely on bulky spherical microphone arrays (SMA), and portable devices like smartphones are limited by array configuration and number of microphones. We propose SHB-AE, a spherical harmonic beamforming based method for Ambisonics encoding using a smartphone microphone array (SPMA). By designing beamformers for each order of spherical harmonic functions based on the array manifold, the method enables Ambisonics encoding and up-scaling. Validation on a real SPMA and its simulated free-field counterpart in noisy and reverberant conditions showed that the method successfully encodes and up-scales Ambisonics up to the fourth order with just four irregularly arranged microphones.
Yuhuan You, Yufan Qian, Tianshu Qu +2
May 24, 2026eess.SP

Time Segmented Beamforming via Dynamic Programming: Theory and Implementation

In dynamic acoustic environments with time-varying interferers, effective beamforming requires identifying stationary regions over time. The Capon beamformer, a whitened matched filter constrained to maintain unity gain in the desired direction, theoretically relies on the instantaneous ensemble covariance matrix. Practical implementations rely on the batch Capon (or Sample Matrix Inversion), which estimates the sample covariance matrix (SCM) by averaging over a block of snapshots. This practical approach implicitly assumes that the data within the batch window is stationary and can be coherently combined. In non-stationary settings, a batch approach that averages over fixed or excessively long windows fails, as moving interferers smear the SCM and degrade the beamformer's nulling capabilities. To address this, this paper introduces a temporally segmented distortionless response beamformer. Inspired by the segmented least squares method, which fits piecewise polynomials to data while penalizing excessive segmentation to prevent overfitting, the framework extends practical Capon beamforming by incorporating data-driven temporal segmentation. This formulation minimizes output power while dynamically adapting the SCM estimation windows to local stationarity, offering a principled approach to tracking time-varying interferers.
Manan Mittal, Ryan M. Corey, Diego Cuji +2
May 14, 2026cs.SD

IsoNet: Spatially-aware audio-visual target speech extraction in complex acoustic environments

Target speech extraction remains difficult for compact devices because monaural neural models lack spatial evidence and classical beamformers lose resolving power when the microphone aperture is only a few centimetres. We present IsoNet, a user-selectable audio-visual target speech extraction system for a compact 4-microphone array. IsoNet combines complex multi-channel STFT features, GCC-PHAT spatial cues, face-conditioned visual embeddings, and auxiliary direction-of-arrival supervision inside a U-Net mask estimation network. Three curriculum variants were trained on 25,000 simulated VoxCeleb mixtures with progressively difficult SNR regimes. On a hard test set spanning -1 to 10 dB SNR, IsoNet-CL1 achieves 9.31 dB SI-SDR, a 4.85 dB improvement over the mixture, with PESQ 2.13 and STOI 0.84. Oracle delay-and-sum and MVDR beamformers degrade the same mixtures by 4.82 dB and 6.08 dB SI-SDRi, respectively, showing that the proposed learned multimodal conditioning solves a regime where conventional spatial filtering is ineffective. Ablation studies show consistent gains from visual conditioning, GCC-PHAT features, and extended delay-bin encoding. The results establish a compact-array, face-selectable speech extraction baseline under controlled simulation and identify the remaining barriers to real deployment, especially phase reconstruction, multi-interferer mixtures, and simulation-to-real transfer.
Dinanath Padhya, Sajen Maharjan, Binita Adhikari +1
May 14, 2026eess.SP

Analog RF Computing: A New Paradigm for Energy-Efficient Edge AI Over MU-MIMO Systems

Modern edge devices increasingly rely on neural networks for intelligent applications. However, conventional digital computing-based edge inference requires substantial memory and energy consumption. In analog radio frequency (RF) computing, a base station (BS) encodes the weights of the neural networks and broadcasts the RF waveforms to the clients. Each client reuses its passive mixer to multiply the received weight-encoded waveform with a locally generated input-encoded waveform. This enables wireless receivers to perform the matrix-vector multiplications (MVMs) that account for most of the computation burden in edge inference with ultra-low energy consumption. Unlike conventional downlink transmissions which are optimized for communications, analog RF computing requires a computing-centric physical layer that controls both the analog MVM accuracy and the energy consumption for inference. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a physical layer design framework for analog RF computing in MU-MIMO wireless systems. We derive tractable models for computing accuracy and energy consumption for inference, formulate a joint BS beamforming and client-side scaling problem subject to computing accuracy, transmit power, and hardware constraints, and develop a low-complexity algorithm to solve the non-convex problem. The proposed design provides client- and layer-specific accuracy control for both uniform- and mixed-precision inference. Simulations under 3GPP specifications show that analog RF computing can significantly reduce client-side energy consumption by nearly two orders of magnitude compared to digital computing, while mixed-precision inference requires even lower energy consumption than uniform-precision inference. Overall, these results establish analog RF computing over wireless networks as a promising paradigm for energy-efficient edge inference.
Wentao Yu, Vincent W. S. Wong
May 12, 2026eess.SP

Recurrent Transformer-Based Near- and Far-Field THz Wideband Channel Estimation for UM-MIMO

The integration of terahertz communications and ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) systems in 6G networks is motivated by their ability to enable unprecedented data rates, mitigate spectrum congestion, and enhance overall network performance. However, the enlarged antenna apertures and higher carrier frequencies in these systems increase the Rayleigh distance, causing users to span both the near-field and conventional far-field regions. Accurate spatial precoding thus requires exact channel estimation at the base station - a task made more challenging by the hybrid coexistence of near- and far-field effects and the limited number of digital chains available in hybrid beamforming architectures. In this paper, we propose a block recurrent transformer model to address this challenge. We demonstrate that a single transformer block equipped with state memory can be trained once and then iteratively applied for hybrid-field channel estimation. Furthermore, we train the model such that it generalizes to wireless channels with varying scatterer distances, different numbers of propagation paths, and wideband operation. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves performance gains of approximately 5 dB and 7.5 dB in normalized mean squared error (NMSE) over state-of-the-art solutions in narrowband and wideband scenarios, respectively.
Dmitry Artemasov, Alexander Shmatok, Kirill Andreev +3
May 11, 2026eess.SP

Adaptive Diagonal Loading using Krylov Subspaces for Robust Beamforming

Reliable adaptive beamforming is critical for large microphone arrays operating in highly dynamic acoustic environments. In scenarios characterized by fast-moving talkers and interferers, the available sample support for estimating the spatial correlation matrix is often snapshot-deficient. This deficiency degrades the White Noise Gain (WNG), leading to severe target signal cancellation. To ensure stable and robust beamforming, we previously proposed an adaptive diagonal loading method that leverages the Kantorovich inequality to guarantee the WNG remains strictly within specified bounds. However, accurately determining the smallest necessary loading level requires calculating the extreme eigenvalues of the spatial correlation matrix, a computationally expensive O(M3)\mathcal{O}(M^3) operation for large arrays. In this paper, we introduce a highly efficient O(kM2)\mathcal{O}(kM^2) estimation technique using Lanczos iterations to build a small Krylov subspace. By projecting the correlation matrix onto a tridiagonal matrix of dimension kMk \ll M, we extract Ritz values that rapidly converge to the exact extreme eigenvalues. Our evaluations demonstrate that this Lanczos-accelerated approach achieves performance identical to exact Eigenvalue Decomposition (EVD), ensuring optimal interference suppression and strict WNG adherence at a fraction of the computational cost.
Manan Mittal, Ryan M. Corey, John R. Buck +1
May 8, 2026cs.SD

Online Segmented Beamforming via Dynamic Programming

In dynamic acoustic environments characterized by time-varying interferers and moving sources, effective beamforming requires accurately identifying stationary regions over time. Traditional Capon beamformers rely on the instantaneous ensemble covariance matrix, which is inaccessible in practice. Practical implementations overcome this by estimating the sample covariance matrix (SCM) through averaging over a block of temporal samples. However, in non-stationary settings, a naive batch approach fails. Moving interferers smear the SCM, causing the beamformer to place nulls in outdated locations while failing to track newly active interferers, thereby degrading its nulling capabilities. To address this fundamental limitation, an Online Segmented Beamformer is proposed. This algorithm incorporates data-driven temporal segmentation to causally minimize output power while dynamically adapting the SCM estimation windows to local stationarity. By framing the problem through the lens of dynamic programming, the proposed method tracks abrupt environmental changes and resets covariance estimates in real-time. We validate the performance of this framework in a complex, reverberant simulated acoustic environment and in highly reverberant real world experiments, demonstrating its superiority over fixed-window adaptive methods.
Manan Mittal, Ryan M. Corey, Diego Cuji +2
May 7, 2026cs.MA

AgenticPrecoding: LLM-Empowered Multi-Agent System for Precoding Optimization

Precoding is a key technique for interference management and performance improvement in multi-antenna wireless systems. However, existing precoding methods are typically developed for specific system models, objectives, and constraint sets, which limits their adaptability to the heterogeneous and evolving scenarios expected in future 6G networks. To address this limitation, we propose AgenticPrecoding, a universal multi-agent framework that automates end-to-end precoding derivation directly from user-level communication requirements. Specifically, AgenticPrecoding decomposes the derivation process into four coordinated stages: problem formulation, solver selection, prompt upsampling, and code generation, assigning each stage to a specialized agent tailored to its specific reasoning demands. We employ two LoRA-adapted reasoning agents to inject precoding-specific domain knowledge for problem formulation and solver selection, while two general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) handle prompt refinement and executable code generation. Furthermore, a feedback-driven refinement mechanism is incorporated to enhance code executability, constraint feasibility, and solution quality. Extensive experiments across 10 representative precoding scenarios demonstrate that AgenticPrecoding achieves superior cross-scenario adaptability compared to conventional optimization-based and LLM-based baselines.
Zijiu Yang, Zixiang Zhang, Shunpu Tang +2
May 6, 2026cs.NI

Look Once, Beam Twice: Camera-Primed Real-Time Double-Directional mmWave Beam Management for Vehicular Connectivity

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies promise multi-gigabit connectivity for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks, but face challenges in terms of severe path loss and mobility-related beam misalignment. Reliable V2X connectivity requires fast, double-directional beam alignment. However, existing methods suffer from high training overhead and limited generalization to unseen scenarios. This paper presents VIsion-based BEamforming(VIBE), a hybrid model-based, closed-loop, learning architecture for real-time double-directional mmWave beam management primed by camera sensing. VIBE fuses machine learning, model-based reasoning, and closed-loop RF feedback to balance beam-pair establishment latency with link quality. VIBE bypasses exhaustive training overhead and accelerates link establishment by leveraging camera observations to reduce the beam-search space. Lightweight beam refinement and offset tracking mechanisms adaptively refine beams in response to dynamic application requirements. VIBE is implemented and evaluated across online indoor/outdoor testbeds, public datasets, and real-time vehicular experiments, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities, making it suitable for real-time V2X communication. Comparisons with 5G NR hierarchical beamforming show that VIBE consistently maintains lower outage rates. Furthermore, VIBE outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end ML models for beam selection when evaluated on public datasets and achieves outage rates as low as 1.1-1.4 %. The results show that a hybrid model-based, closed-loop learning architecture is better suited for real-world mmWave vehicular connectivity than end-to-end trained ML models. For reproducibility, we publish our code to https://github.com/UNL-CPN-Lab/Look-Once-Beam-Twice.
Avhishek Biswas, Apala Pramanik, Eylem Ekici +1
May 5, 2026eess.SY

Adaptive Diagonal Loading for Norm Constrained Beamforming

Reliable adaptive beamforming is critical for large microphone arrays operating in highly dynamic acoustic environments. In scenarios characterized by fast-moving talkers and interferers, the available sample support for estimating the spatial correlation matrix is often snapshot-deficient. This deficiency, coupled with array imperfections, degrades the White Noise Gain (WNG), leading to severe target signal cancellation. To ensure stable and robust beamforming, we propose a novel adaptive diagonal loading method that guarantees the WNG remains strictly within specified bounds. By leveraging the Kantorovich inequality, we map the desired WNG to a strict upper bound on the condition number of the correlation matrix. Furthermore, we present three estimation techniques for the adaptive loading level, ranging from trace-based bounding to exact eigenvalue decomposition, offering scalable computational complexities of O(M)\mathcal{O}(M), O(M2)\mathcal{O}(M^2), and O(M3)\mathcal{O}(M^3). Our approach demonstrates highly stable beamforming under fast-changing interference.
Manan Mittal, Ryan M. Corey, John R. Buck +1
May 4, 2026cs.MA

Enwar 3.0: An Agentic Multi-Modal LLM Orchestrator for Situation-Aware Beamforming, Blockage Prediction, and Handover Management

Maintaining robust millimeter-wave (mmWave) connectivity in vehicular networks requires real-time adaptation to environmental dynamics, sensor degradation, and link variability. This paper presents Enwar 3.0, an environment-aware reasoning framework that unifies multi-modal sensing, agentic large language models (LLMs), and context-driven model selection for predictive beamforming, blockage detection, and handover management. Building upon prior iterations of Enwar, the proposed architecture integrates a classifier-driven assessment of sensor health with a primed LLM that orchestrates multiple specialized agents through structured, task-aware prompting. A novel synthetic degradation pipeline enables the training of a sensor degradation classifier that detects real-time impairments across camera, radar, LiDAR, and GPS inputs, achieving over 99% accuracy. The LLM, trained via chain-of-thought (CoT) priming and human-in-the-loop feedback, coordinates agent calls for beam selection, blockage forecasting, and environment perception while dynamically loading sensor-specific models based on environmental context. Extensive evaluations across 15 sensor combinations demonstrate that Enwar 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art performance in both predictive accuracy and interpretability, with beam selection accuracy exceeding 88%, blockage F1-scores surpassing 98%, and reasoning correctness reaching 87% on complex decision prompts. This work establishes a scalable foundation for LLM-integrated wireless systems that reason, perceive, and adapt in real-time.
Ahmad M. Nazar, Abdulkadir Celik, Asmaa Abdallah +3
May 2, 2026eess.SP

Spectral- and Energy-efficient Multi-BS Multi-RIS Pinching-antenna Systems: A GNN-based Approach

This paper investigates coordinated downlink transmission in a multi-base station (multi-BS) multi-reconfigurable intelligent surface (multi-RIS)-assisted pinching-antenna (PA) system, where each user equipment (UE) is associated with a single BS and each BS is equipped with movable PAs deployed on parallel waveguides. We formulate sum rate (SR) and energy efficiency (EE) maximization problems by jointly optimizing PA placement, RIS phase shifts, transmit beamforming, and BS-UE association under constraints of inter-PA spacing, power budget, and unit-modulus phase shift. To address the resulting highly coupled mixed-variable problem, we propose a three-stage graph neural network (GNN) that integrates heterogeneous and homogeneous graph representations and is trained end-to-end in an unsupervised manner. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed three-stage GNN consistently outperforms representative system and learning baselines, generalizes well to unseen numbers of UEs, RISs, and BSs, and maintains millisecond-level inference time. Besides, the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design from both system and architectural perspectives. Moreover, PAs are shown to enhance SR and EE, and the performance gain is enlarged with increasing number of PAs.
Changpeng He, Yang Lu, Wei Chen +3
Apr 4, 2026cs.LG

Algebraic Diversity: Group-Theoretic Spectral Estimation from Single Observations

We establish that temporal averaging over multiple observations is the degenerate case of algebraic group action with the trivial group G={e}G=\{e\}. A General Replacement Theorem proves that a group-averaged estimator from one snapshot achieves equivalent subspace decomposition to multi-snapshot covariance estimation. The Trivial Group Embedding Theorem proves that the sample covariance is the accumulation of trivial-group estimates, with variance governed by a (G,L)(G,L) continuum as 1/(GL)1/(|G|\cdot L). The processing gain 10log10(M)10\log_{10}(M) dB equals the classical beamforming gain, establishing that this gain is a property of group order, not sensor count. The DFT, DCT, and KLT are unified as group-matched special cases. We conjecture a General Algebraic Averaging Theorem extending these results to arbitrary statistics, with variance governed by the effective group order deffd_{\mathrm{eff}}. Monte Carlo experiments on the first four sample moments across five group types confirm the conjecture to four-digit precision. The framework exploits the structurestructure of information (representation-theoretic symmetry of the data object) rather than the content, complementing Shannon's theory. Five applications are demonstrated: single-snapshot MUSIC, massive MIMO, single-pulse waveform classification, graph signal processing, and analysis of transformer LLMs. Techniques for blind group matching are described.
Mitchell A. Thornton
Jul 23, 2025cs.NI

LLM-Aided Joint Secrecy Precoding and Trajectory for RSMA-Based Heterogeneous UAV Networks

This paper investigates secure communications in rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) enabled heterogeneous UAV networks, where multiple UAVs collaboratively serve ground terminals in the presence of eavesdroppers. By jointly considering secrecy rate maximization and propulsion energy consumption minimization, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem involving UAV trajectory design, service association, power allocation, and secrecy precoding under mobility, collision-avoidance, service-capacity, and communication constraints. The formulated problem is highly non-convex due to the coupling among UAV trajectories, RSMA transmission variables, and secrecy constraints. To address the resulting non-convex and highly coupled optimization problem, we propose a hierarchical optimization framework. The inner layer uses a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based S2DC algorithm combining penalty functions and difference-of-convex (D.C.) programming to solve the secrecy precoding problem with fixed UAV positions. The outer layer introduces a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning approach (LLM-HeMARL) for trajectory optimization. LLM-HeMARL efficiently incorporates LLM-generated expert heuristic policy, enabling UAVs to learn energy-aware, security-driven trajectories without the inference overhead of real-time LLM calls. The simulation results show that our method outperforms existing baselines in secrecy rate and energy efficiency, with consistent robustness across varying UAV swarm sizes and random seeds.
Lijie Zheng, Ji He, Shih Yu Chang +1
Date pendingeess.AS

Cyclic MPDR Beamforming for Suppression of Almost-Cyclostationary Acoustic Interference

Conventional acoustic beamformers typically assume short-time stationarity and process frequency bins independently, ignoring inter-frequency correlations. This is suboptimal for almost-periodic noise sources such as engines, fans, and musical instruments: these signals are better modeled as (almost) cyclostationary (ACS) processes with statistically correlated spectral components. This paper introduces the cyclic minimum power distortionless response (cMPDR) beamformer, which extends the conventional MPDR to jointly exploit spatial and spectral correlations. Building on frequency-shifted (FRESH) filtering, it suppresses noise components that are coherent across harmonically related frequencies, reducing residual noise beyond what spatial filtering alone can achieve. To address inharmonicity, where partials deviate from exact integer multiples of a fundamental frequency, we estimate resonant frequencies from a periodogram and derive frequency shifts from their pairwise spacing. Theoretical analysis yields closed-form expressions for residual noise and proves that output power decreases monotonically with the number of cyclic components. Experiments on synthetic harmonic noise and real UAV motor recordings confirm these findings: in low-SNR scenarios, the cMPDR achieves up to 5 dB improvement in SI-SDR over the MPDR, yields consistent STOI gains, and remains effective with a single microphone. When spectral correlation is absent, the method reduces to conventional MPDR and does not degrade performance. These results suggest that cyclic processing is a viable direction for acoustic noise reduction that deserves further investigation. Code and audio samples are available at https://github.com/Screeen/cMPDR.
Giovanni Bologni, Martin Bo M\oller, Richard Heusdens +1