Task-Oriented Multimodal Edge Intelligence via Integrated Sensing-Communication-Computation

Integrated sensing, communication, and computation (ISCC) has recently emerged as a unified framework for enabling edge intelligence. However, existing ISCC designs predominantly rely on single-modal sensing, which is inherently vulnerable to occlusions, environmental uncertainties, and modality-specific failures, leading to degraded robustness in real-world deployments. This motivates the need for multi-modal ISCC, yet its design remains insufficiently explored. Compared with the single-modal case, multi-modal ISCC is more challenging because heterogeneous modalities enlarge data dimensionality and tighten communication/computation/energy budgets, while inter-modal correlations further complicate performance characterization. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented multi-modal ISCC framework that integrates device-side feature extraction with edge-side joint multi-modal inference. A central component of our approach is the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR^2) criterion, which enables each device to learn compact and discriminative task-relevant features, offering clear advantages over conventional cross-entropy-based extractors. We further leverage MCR^2 as a principled metric for edge-side sensing evaluation. On this basis, we formulate a sensing accuracy maximization problem under delay and resource constraints and develop an efficient block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm after transforming the problem into a more tractable equivalent form. Focusing on a human activity recognition task, we conduct extensive experiments on publicly available datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed ISCC framework. The results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms three baseline schemes under limited resource conditions.

Edge-Assisted Multimodal UAV Localization with Resource-Efficient Compression and Robust Fusion

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will play an important role in the future urban transportation systems. This requires designing robust localization schemes especially for non-cooperative UAVs that do not share any information about their movements. This paper designs a multimodal UAV localization framework which utilizes camera, LiDAR and radar sensing modalities. The underlying data processing and the subsequent inference of the UAV location are distributed among the sensing nodes and the edge server attached to the base station. The proposed UAV localization framework addresses three key challenges. First, the sensing nodes have limited computing and communication resources, and they contain only single modality sensors. Second, the multimodal data differ greatly in the sampling rates, time alignment and the encodings. Third, the changes in the environment and the hardware failures cause the modal data to degrade, or to be completely missing. The proposed localization framework utilizes several data processing modules including a information-bottleneck (IB)-based compression module that extracts the most relevant features from each modality, a time-encoding alignment module that provides the unified representation in a shared latent space, a multimodal fusion module that accounts for the degraded and missing data, and a Mamba-based regression module that predicts the present UAV location. The experiments involving a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework accurately and reliably obtains the UAV location while outperforming other existing frameworks.

Architecture-driven Shift: towards a lightweight selector for capturing the trends of logit shift

Continual Learning (CL) is a practical paradigm to utilize power of deep pre-trained neural networks, but which pre-trained model has a better ability to balance ``Plasticity-Stability", deserving to be chosen? The logit shift serves as a natural proxy because it represents the logit shift in CL scenarios. However, obtaining the logit shift requires huge computational cost, which hinders large-scale model selection. Existing theoretical analyses fail to offer an efficient alternative because of the assumption of uniform hidden layer widths, which ignores the structural heterogeneity (variable width and depth) of real-world architectures. This raises a critical question: what theoretically relationship can be identified between heterogeneous architecture and logit shift on prior tasks (that the model has been trained on)? To answer the question, we decouple logit shift into architecture dependency and data dependency to establish our framework, which reveals that the combination of two dependency, defined as Architecture-driven Shift (ADS), that can capture the logit shift tendency well computable with few data samples. Specifically, for a well-optimized model on prior tasks, higher ADS is associated with a larger logit shift after training on the current task, which derived based on three mechanistic components: (1) spectral norm scaling of weight matrix gradients with layer width, (2) the optimization path length of the new task, and (3) the asymptotic task conflict in wide networks. Extensive empirical results across more than 175 diverse architectures demonstrate a strong monotonic correlation (the weakest Spearman's $r_s=0.731$) between ADS and logit shift. Practically, we demonstrate that ADS can serve as a lightweight proxy of the expected calibration error, which is a widely used metric for reliable CL model selection, on three datasets across six scenarios.

PanopticQuery: Unified Query-Time Reasoning for 4D Scenes

Understanding dynamic 4D environments through natural language queries requires not only accurate scene reconstruction but also robust semantic grounding across space, time, and viewpoints. While recent methods using neural representations have advanced 4D reconstruction, they remain limited in contextual reasoning, especially for complex semantics such as interactions, temporal actions, and spatial relations. A key challenge lies in transforming noisy, view-dependent predictions into globally consistent 4D interpretations. We introduce PanopticQuery, a framework for unified query-time reasoning in 4D scenes. Our approach builds on 4D Gaussian Splatting for high-fidelity dynamic reconstruction and introduces a multi-view semantic consensus mechanism that grounds natural language queries by aggregating 2D semantic predictions across multiple views and time frames. This process filters inconsistent outputs, enforces geometric consistency, and lifts 2D semantics into structured 4D groundings via neural field optimization. To support evaluation, we present Panoptic-L4D, a new benchmark for language-based querying in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that PanopticQuery sets a new state of the art on complex language queries, effectively handling attributes, actions, spatial relationships, and multi-object interactions. A video demonstration is available in the supplementary materials.