Exploiting Movable-Element STARS for Rate Splitting Multiple Access

This paper investigates a movable-element simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (ME-STARS) assisted rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) system under imperfect channel state information (CSI). Unlike conventional STARS with fixed element positions, the elements of ME-STARS can be repositioned within a predefined region, providing additional spatial degrees of freedom for improving the cascaded transmitter--STARS--user channels. To exploit this flexibility while accounting for CSI uncertainty, we formulate a robust sum-rate maximization problem that jointly optimizes the transmit beamforming, common-rate allocation, reflection and transmission coefficients, and ME-STARS element positions, subject to transmit-power, user-rate, minimum inter-element spacing, and movement-region constraints. The resulting problem is highly non-convex due to the strong coupling among the design variables and the position-dependent channels. To address this challenge, an iterative optimization framework is developed in which the transmit beamforming, STARS coefficients, and element positions are successively optimized through tractable convex reformulations. In particular, the element positions are updated sequentially using a majorization--minimization (MM) framework, where quadratic surrogate functions are constructed from the first- and second-order derivatives of the position-dependent channels while preserving the minimum inter-element spacing constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ME-STARS design consistently outperforms the considered benchmark schemes. Moreover, the performance gains remain significant under increasing CSI uncertainty, highlighting the effectiveness of element repositioning for robust RSMA transmission.

Energy Efficient Multi-User Beamforming and 3D Position Optimization for SIM-Assisted UAVs

This paper studies energy-efficient downlink multi-user transmissions with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems equipped with stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM), enabling wave-domain analog beamforming through multiple cascaded metasurface layers, while low-dimensional digital precoding is carried out using a limited number of transmit radio-frequency chains. This architecture enables flexible electromagnetic wave manipulation with reduced hardware complexity, making it particularly suitable for energy-constrained aerial platforms. We formulate a hardware-aware energy-efficiency (EE) maximization problem aiming to jointly optimize the digital precoder, the phase shifts of all SIM layers, and the three-dimensional UAV position under transmit-power, SIM operation, and UAV deployment constraints. The resulting problem is highly non-convex due to the fractional objective, the cascaded SIM structure and the unit-modulus phase constraints of the constituent metasurface layers, as well as the non-linear UAV-dependent channel. To address these challenges, we develop a transform-based alternating optimization framework that combines Dinkelbach's method, dual and quadratic transforms, to enable closed-form digital beamforming, Riemannian manifold optimization for SIM phase shifts, and successive convex approximation (SCA) for UAV positioning. Convergence and complexity analyses are provided to characterize the proposed algorithm. The presented numerical results showcase that the proposed joint design significantly improves EE compared with fully digital and maximum ratio transmission benchmark schemes, while revealing important design trade-offs among transmit power, SIM size, and the number of its constituent stacked layers.

Extremely Large Beyond-Diagonal RIS: Low-Rank Modal Optimization for Near-Field Communications

Beyond-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (BD-RIS) achieve their best performance when fully connected, at the price of an optimization and hardware burden that grows quadratically, and per iteration cubically, with the number of elements. Extremely large surfaces make this burden prohibitive, while their sheer aperture places both the base station and the users in the radiative near field, where far-field design tools break down. This paper introduces the extremely large BD-RIS (XL-BD-RIS) concept and shows that near-field geometry is precisely what makes fully connected performance affordable at scale. Modeling the cascade with the free-space Green function, we prove that the aperture fields live in a low-dimensional subspace spanned by the spherical-wave responses of the terminal positions, and we design a compact unitary modal matrix on this subspace, built from localization information alone, that provably attains the fully connected optimum with a number of reconfigurable entries set by the geometry and independent of the panel size. A weighted-MMSE Riemannian algorithm optimizes the beamformers and the modal matrix with monotone convergence at panel-size-independent cost. Numerical results show that a $24\times24$-element panel reaches the fully connected optimum with about two hundred entries instead of three hundred thousand. A mismatched DFT beamspace pays a sixty-fold entry penalty rooted in the beam spread of spherical wavefronts, while the classical block-wise architecture delivers strictly lower rates at any matched entry budget.

Wavenumber-Domain Virtual Arrays for Holographic Near-Field Localization

Monostatic localization of multiple point targets is studied for a holographic aperture operated through wavenumber-domain modes. A specular-point condition delimits the validity of the spectral model as a near-field approximation. A single snapshot observes a projection of dimension at most the target count times the polarization components, while invertible coding recovers the full channel and places the decoded data on the difference lattice of transmit and receive wavenumbers. Rank conditions settle identifiability, and the Fisher matrix reduces to a covariance over the lattice, dictating a nested mode selection that attains full-aperture resolution with only tens of RF chains.

TIGA: Trajectory-Injected Generative Attack against Black-box AIGC Detectors

Recent diffusion models have achieved remarkable realism in facial image synthesis, posing growing challenges to artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) forensic detectors.Existing evasion methods typically perturb pre-generated images or require detector-aware training, which may introduce visible or statistical artifacts and limit applicability when the diffusion model must remain frozen and the target detector is accessible only through black-box queries. We propose Trajectory-Injected Generative Attack (TIGA), a source-image-free and training free framework that generates detector-evasive images within a single diffusion sampling trajectory. TIGA steers the latent Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) trajectory so that adversarial properties emerge during generation rather than being added afterward. TIGA first aggregates gradients from multiple white-box surrogate detectors to form a transferable, sign-aware prior, and then performs anisotropic directional search with symmetric finite-difference queries to estimate the black-box target response. The estimated directions are stabilized by decayed momentum and injected according to the DDIM noise schedule, with frequency-domain reshaping to suppress high frequency artifacts. Experiments on surrogate and unseen specialized forensic detectors show that TIGA achieves strong blackbox attack performance, transferability, and high robustness under common post-processing operations without source images or diffusion-model retraining, while preserving high perceptual quality.

Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Assisted UAV Communications

In this paper, we investigate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system assisted by stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), which enable programmable wave-domain signal processing through multiple cascaded metasurface layers. By shifting part of the beamforming functionality from the RF/digital domain to the electromagnetic domain, SIMs allow the realization of energy-efficient hybrid beamforming architectures suitable for aerial platforms. We formulate the joint design of digital precoding, SIM phase configuration, and UAV positioning for multi-user downlink sum-rate maximization. To solve the resulting non-convex problem, we develop an alternating optimization framework that guarantees monotonic improvement of the objective. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SIM-assisted architecture significantly improves spectral efficiency while maintaining low hardware complexity, and highlight the impact of the number of metasurface layers and size of each layer on system performance.

Quantum Reservoir Computing: Recent Advances and Future Directions

Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) uses the dynamics of a fixed or weakly tuned quantum system to transform temporal and sequential inputs into measured features, while training is typically confined to a classical readout. This separation reduces reliance on repeated quantum parameter updates and avoids the barren plateaus associated with variational circuit training. Its computational power is often attributed to the exponentially large Hilbert space of the quantum system. However, the memory, nonlinearity, and expressivity that determine what a reservoir can actually compute depend jointly on the input encoding, quantum evolution, observables, measurement, and readout, not on Hilbert space dimension alone. On hardware, these capabilities are further constrained by finite sampling, hardware noise, measurement backaction, and the cost of estimating observables, so a large state space alone does not guarantee useful computation. In this survey, we develop a common system model that connects these components and use it to organize QRC foundations, computational properties, reservoir architectures, operating protocols, and physical implementations. We examine spin, photonic, superconducting, bosonic, neutral atom, and other analog platforms, together with applications, software and high performance computing support, benchmarking, and reproducibility. The analysis distinguishes hardware demonstrations from simulations and identifies the assumptions and resources that govern comparisons across implementations. Current results do not establish a broad quantum advantage over well matched classical reservoirs. We therefore specify the resource accounting, benchmark standards, and theoretical criteria needed to evaluate claims of quantum advantage.

Seeing Through WiFi: Lightweight Human Pose Estimation with Dynamic Kernel Attention

WiFi-based human pose estimation (HPE) enables the detection and interpretation of human body positions and movements without the need for wearable devices while preserving individual privacy concerns. Implementing this solution requires enhancing model performance and maintaining efficiency, especially on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces a novel framework, WiLHPE, for lightweight and efficient human pose estimation using WiFi CSI signals. Empowered by a camera-based model during training, WiLHPE processes raw WiFi signals directly to estimate human poses in the testing phase. It employs a novel neural network architecture to dynamically learn convolutional kernels and apply attention mechanisms across channel and frequency spaces. This innovative method diversifies the kernels to improve the recognition capabilities of WiFi signals without adding complexity, ensuring efficiency. Additionally, the Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator algorithm is employed to optimize the critical hyperparameters of the neural network efficiently, minimizing the time required for optimal hyperparameter search compared to heuristic methods. Results from experiments on both the MM-Fi and WiPose datasets highlight the superiority of WiLHPE over state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 85.96% and 94.27% at PCK50, respectively, with minimal computational overhead. Notably, WiLHPE performs impressively even under challenging conditions, maintaining around 80% at PCK50 under AWGN noise with an error variance of 0.5.

Sparse Channel Estimation for SIM-based mmWave Near-Field Communications

In this paper, we address the channel estimation (CE) problem in SIM-based multi-user (MU) millimeter-wave (mmWave) near-field communication systems. To address the severe path loss and blockage in mmWave communication systems, many meta-atoms are typically integrated into each layer of the SIM. Then, the number of radio frequency (RF) chains at the base station (BS) is fewer than that of meta-atoms per layer, resulting in an underdetermined problem. Additionally, the increase in the number of meta-atoms in each layer expands the SIM's near-field region, leading to the user equipment (UEs) being mostly situated in this region, necessitating precise modeling of the channel under the spherical wavefront assumption. To address these issues, we introduce a compressed sensing (CS)-based CE protocol to tackle the underdetermined problem. In contrast to the traditional CS-based estimation framework, we investigate a polar-domain channel representation to tackle the severe energy spread effect of the classical angular-domain channel representation in near-field communication systems. Specifically, we design a novel polar-domain transform matrix for uniform planar arrays (UPAs), thereby transforming the CE problem into a sparse recovery task of the paths' support set and complex gains. To overcome the limitations of the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework in tackling high-dimensional dictionaries, we propose a low-complexity polar-domain SBL (LCPD-SBL) algorithm, which significantly reduces computational complexity without compromising estimation accuracy.

Digital Twin-Assisted Adaptive Multi-Agent DRL for Intelligent Spectrum and Resource Management in Open-RAN UAV-Enabled 6G Networks

The evolution toward 6G wireless networks envisions a seamlessly intelligent, Open-RAN-enabled architecture where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a pivotal role in extending coverage, enhancing resilience, and ensuring reliable connectivity for ground users deployment. However, efficiently managing spectrum and resources in such highly dynamic UAV-assisted environments remains a major challenge due to nonlinear system interactions, mobility-induced topology variations, and stringent latency and energy constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a digital twin (DT)-assisted adaptive deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that enables intelligent spectrum sharing and resource allocation across distributed ground users. The complex optimization problem is decomposed into UAV trajectory optimization using particle swarm optimization (PSO) and dynamic spectrum-power-association management via multi-agent DRL (MADRL). This hybrid DT-driven approach empowers intelligent, context-aware decision-making and adaptive coordination among UAVs. Extensive simulations demonstrate significant gains in spectral efficiency, data rates, and energy utilization, showcasing a transformative path toward self-evolving, autonomous 6G UAV and ground users (GUs) connectivity.