Henk Wymeersch

Markus Fröhle, Christopher Lindberg, Karl Granström et al.

In a typical multitarget tracking (MTT) scenario, the sensor state is either assumed known, or tracking is performed in the sensor's (relative) coordinate frame. This assumption does not hold when the sensor, e.g., an automotive radar, is mounted on a vehicle, and the target state should be represented in a global (absolute) coordinate frame. Then it is important to consider the uncertain location of the vehicle on which the sensor is mounted for MTT. In this paper, we present a multisensor low complexity Poisson multi-Bernoulli MTT filter, which jointly tracks the uncertain vehicle state and target states. Measurements collected by different sensors mounted on multiple vehicles with varying location uncertainty are incorporated sequentially based on the arrival of new sensor measurements. In doing so, targets observed from a sensor mounted on a well-localized vehicle reduce the state uncertainty of other poorly localized vehicles, provided that a common non-empty subset of targets is observed. A low complexity filter is obtained by approximations of the joint sensor-feature state density minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). Results from synthetic as well as experimental measurement data, collected in a vehicle driving scenario, demonstrate the performance benefits of joint vehicle-target state tracking.

Vukan Ninkovic, Dejan Vukobratovic, Christian Häger et al.

Most of today's communication systems are designed to target reliable message recovery after receiving the entire encoded message (codeword). However, in many practical scenarios, the transmission process may be interrupted before receiving the complete codeword. This paper proposes a novel rateless autoencoder (AE)-based code design suitable for decoding the transmitted message before the noisy codeword is fully received. Using particular dropout strategies applied during the training process, rateless AE codes allow to trade off between decoding delay and reliability, providing a graceful improvement of the latter with each additionally received codeword symbol. The proposed rateless AEs significantly outperform the conventional AE designs for scenarios where it is desirable to trade off reliability for lower decoding delay.

Musa Furkan Keskin, Muralikrishnan Srinivasan, Onur Gunlu et al.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) will be central to 6G-enabled transportation, providing both seamless connectivity and high-precision sensing. However, this tight integration exposes attack points not encountered in pure sensing and communication systems. In this article, we identify unique ISAC-induced security challenges and opportunities in three interrelated domains: cyber-physical (where manipulation of sensors and actuators can mislead perception and control), physical-layer (where over-the-air signals are vulnerable to spoofing and jamming) and protocol (where complex cryptographic protocols cannot detect lower-layer attacks). Building on these insights, we put forward a multi-domain security vision for 6G transportation and propose an integrated security framework that unifies protection across domains by leveraging existing ISAC measurements for lightweight cross-checks.

Christopher Lindberg, Julien M. Hendrickx, Henk Wymeersch

Belief propagation (BP) is a powerful tool to solve distributed inference problems, though it is limited by short cycles in the corresponding factor graph. Such cycles may lead to incorrect solutions or oscillatory behavior. Only for certain types of problems are convergence properties understood. We extend this knowledge by investigating the use of reweighted BP for distributed likelihood fusion problems, which are characterized by equality constraints along possibly short cycles. Through a linear formulation of BP, we are able to analytically derive convergence conditions for certain types of graphs and optimize the convergence speed. We compare with standard belief consensus and observe significantly faster convergence.

Muralikrishnan Srinivasan, Linda Senigagliesi, Hui Chen et al.

We discuss the use of angle of arrival (AoA) as an authentication measure in analog array multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. A base station equipped with an analog array authenticates users based on the AoA estimated from certified pilot transmissions, while active attackers manipulate their transmitted signals to mount impersonation attacks. We study several attacks of increasing intensity (captured through the availability of side information at the attackers) and assess the performance of AoA-based authentication using one-class classifiers. Our results show that some attack techniques with knowledge of the combiners at the verifier are effective in falsifying the AoA and compromising the security of the considered type of physical layer authentication.

Juliano Pinto, Georg Hess, William Ljungbergh et al.

Multitarget Tracking (MTT) is the problem of tracking the states of an unknown number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications to autonomous driving, surveillance, robotics, and others. In the model-based Bayesian setting, there are conjugate priors that enable us to express the multi-object posterior in closed form, which could theoretically provide Bayes-optimal estimates. However, the posterior involves a super-exponential growth of the number of hypotheses over time, forcing state-of-the-art methods to resort to approximations for remaining tractable, which can impact their performance in complex scenarios. Model-free methods based on deep-learning provide an attractive alternative, as they can, in principle, learn the optimal filter from data, but to the best of our knowledge were never compared to current state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, specially not in contexts where accurate models are available. In this paper, we propose a high-performing deep-learning method for MTT based on the Transformer architecture and compare it to two state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, in a setting where we assume the correct model is provided. Although this gives an edge to the model-based filters, it also allows us to generate unlimited training data. We show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian filters in complex scenarios, while matching their performance in simpler cases, which validates the applicability of deep-learning also in the model-based regime. The code for all our implementations is made available at https://github.com/JulianoLagana/MT3 .

Baptiste Chatelier, José Miguel Mateos-Ramos, Vincent Corlay et al.

Direction of arrival (DoA) estimation is a common sensing problem in radar, sonar, audio, and wireless communication systems. It has gained renewed importance with the advent of the integrated sensing and communication paradigm. To fully exploit the potential of such sensing systems, it is crucial to take into account potential hardware impairments that can negatively impact the obtained performance. This study introduces a joint DoA estimation and hardware impairment learning scheme following a model-based approach. Specifically, a differentiable version of the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is derived, allowing efficient learning of the considered impairments. The proposed approach supports both supervised and unsupervised learning strategies, showcasing its practical potential. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method successfully learns significant inaccuracies in both antenna locations and complex gains. Additionally, the proposed method outperforms the classical MUSIC algorithm in the DoA estimation task.

Guangjin Pan, Kaixuan Huang, Hui Chen et al.

Accurate and robust localization is a critical enabler for emerging 5G and 6G applications, including autonomous driving, extended reality (XR), and smart manufacturing. While data-driven approaches have shown promise, most existing models require large amounts of labeled data and struggle to generalize across deployment scenarios and wireless configurations. To address these limitations, we propose a foundation-model-based solution tailored for wireless localization. We first analyze how different self-supervised learning (SSL) tasks acquire general-purpose and task-specific semantic features based on information bottleneck (IB) theory. Building on this foundation, we design a pretraining methodology for the proposed Large Wireless Localization Model (LWLM). Specifically, we propose an SSL framework that jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: (i) spatial-frequency masked channel modeling (SF-MCM), (ii) domain-transformation invariance (DTI), and (iii) position-invariant contrastive learning (PICL). These objectives jointly capture the underlying semantics of wireless channel from multiple perspectives. We further design lightweight decoders for key downstream tasks, including time-of-arrival (ToA) estimation, angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation, single base station (BS) localization, and multiple BS localization. Comprehensive experimental results confirm that LWLM consistently surpasses both model-based and supervised learning baselines across all localization tasks. In particular, LWLM achieves 26.0%--87.5% improvement over transformer models without pretraining, and exhibits strong generalization under label-limited fine-tuning and unseen BS configurations, confirming its potential as a foundation model for wireless localization.

Juliano Pinto, Georg Hess, Yuxuan Xia et al.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the task of estimating the state trajectories of an unknown and time-varying number of objects over a certain time window. Several algorithms have been proposed to tackle the multi-object smoothing task, where object detections can be conditioned on all the measurements in the time window. However, the best-performing methods suffer from intractable computational complexity and require approximations, performing suboptimally in complex settings. Deep learning based algorithms are a possible venue for tackling this issue but have not been applied extensively in settings where accurate multi-object models are available and measurements are low-dimensional. We propose a novel DL architecture specifically tailored for this setting that decouples the data association task from the smoothing task. We compare the performance of the proposed smoother to the state-of-the-art in different tasks of varying difficulty and provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comparison between traditional Bayesian trackers and DL trackers in the smoothing problem setting.

Guangjin Pan, Zhixing Li, Ayça Özçelikkale et al.

In closed-loop distributed multi-sensor integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, performance often hinges on transmitting high-dimensional sensor observations over rate-limited networks. In this paper, we first present a general framework for rate-limited closed-loop distributed ISAC systems, and then propose an autoencoder-based observation compression method to overcome the constraints imposed by limited transmission capacity. Building on this framework, we conduct a case study using a closed-loop linear quadratic regulator (LQR) system to analyze how the interplay among observation, compression, and state dimensions affects reconstruction accuracy, state estimation error, and control performance. In multi-sensor scenarios, our results further show that optimal resource allocation initially prioritizes low-noise sensors until the compression becomes lossless, after which resources are reallocated to high-noise sensors.

Baptiste Chatelier, Vincent Corlay, Musa Furkan Keskin et al.

The increasing deployment of large antenna arrays at base stations has significantly improved the spatial resolution and localization accuracy of radio-localization methods. However, traditional signal processing techniques struggle in complex radio environments, particularly in scenarios dominated by non line of sight (NLoS) propagation paths, resulting in degraded localization accuracy. Recent developments in machine learning have facilitated the development of machine learning-assisted localization techniques, enhancing localization accuracy in complex radio environments. However, these methods often involve substantial computational complexity during both the training and inference phases. This work extends the well-established fingerprinting-based localization framework by simultaneously reducing its memory requirements and improving its accuracy. Specifically, a model-based neural network is used to learn the location-to-channel mapping, and then serves as a generative neural channel model. This generative model augments the fingerprinting comparison dictionary while reducing the memory requirements. The proposed method outperforms fingerprinting baselines by achieving sub-wavelength localization accuracy, even in complex static NLoS environments. Remarkably, it offers an improvement by several orders of magnitude in localization accuracy, while simultaneously reducing memory requirements by an order of magnitude compared to classical fingerprinting methods.

Hyowon Kim, Angel F. García-Fernández, Yu Ge et al.

Belief propagation (BP) is a useful probabilistic inference algorithm for efficiently computing approximate marginal probability densities of random variables. However, in its standard form, BP is only applicable to the vector-type random variables with a fixed and known number of vector elements, while certain applications rely on RFSs with an unknown number of vector elements. In this paper, we develop BP rules for factor graphs defined on sequences of RFSs where each RFS has an unknown number of elements, with the intention of deriving novel inference methods for RFSs. Furthermore, we show that vector-type BP is a special case of set-type BP, where each RFS follows the Bernoulli process. To demonstrate the validity of developed set-type BP, we apply it to the PMB filter for SLAM, which naturally leads to new set-type BP-mapping, SLAM, multi-target tracking, and simultaneous localization and tracking filters. Finally, we explore the relationships between the vector-type BP and the proposed set-type BP PMB-SLAM implementations and show a performance gain of the proposed set-type BP PMB-SLAM filter in comparison with the vector-type BP-SLAM filter.

Juliano Pinto, Georg Hess, William Ljungbergh et al.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the problem of tracking the state of an unknown and time-varying number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications such as autonomous driving, tracking animal behavior, defense systems, and others. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been increasingly used in MOT for improving tracking performance, but mostly in settings where the measurements are high-dimensional and there are no available models of the measurement likelihood and the object dynamics. The model-based setting instead has not attracted as much attention, and it is still unclear if DL methods can outperform traditional model-based Bayesian methods, which are the state of the art (SOTA) in this context. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based DL tracker and evaluate its performance in the model-based setting, comparing it to SOTA model-based Bayesian methods in a variety of different tasks. Our results show that the proposed DL method can match the performance of the model-based methods in simple tasks, while outperforming them when the task gets more complicated, either due to an increase in the data association complexity, or to stronger nonlinearities of the models of the environment.

Yu Ge, Yibo Wu, Fan Jiang et al.

5G millimeter wave (mmWave) signals have inherent geometric connections to the propagation channel and the propagation environment. Thus, they can be used to jointly localize the receiver and map the propagation environment, which is termed as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). One of the most important tasks in the 5G SLAM is to deal with the nonlinearity of the measurement model. To solve this problem, existing 5G SLAM approaches rely on sigma-point or extended Kalman filters, linearizing the measurement function with respect to the prior probability density function (PDF). In this paper, we study the linearization of the measurement function with respect to the posterior PDF, and implement the iterated posterior linearization filter into the Poisson multi-Bernoulli SLAM filter. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy and precision improvements of the resulting SLAM filter.

Jiguang He, Fan Jiang, Kamran Keykhosravi et al.

Upcoming beyond fifth generation (5G) communications systems aim at further enhancing key performance indicators and fully supporting brand new use cases by embracing emerging techniques, e.g., reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), integrated communication, localization, and sensing, and mmWave/THz communications. The wireless intelligence empowered by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques has been widely considered at the transceivers, and now the paradigm is deemed to be shifted to the smart control of radio propagation environment by virtue of RISs. In this article, we argue that to harness the full potential of RISs, localization and communication must be tightly coupled. This is in sharp contrast to 5G and earlier generations, where localization was a minor additional service. To support this, we first introduce the fundamentals of RIS mmWave channel modeling, followed by RIS channel state information acquisition and link establishment. Then, we deal with the connection between localization and communications, from a separate and joint perspective.

Jiguang He, Henk Wymeersch, Marco Di Renzo et al.

Inspired by the remarkable learning and prediction performance of deep neural networks (DNNs), we apply one special type of DNN framework, known as model-driven deep unfolding neural network, to reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems. We focus on uplink cascaded channel estimation, where known and fixed base station combining and RIS phase control matrices are considered for collecting observations. To boost the estimation performance and reduce the training overhead, the inherent channel sparsity of mmWave channels is leveraged in the deep unfolding method. It is verified that the proposed deep unfolding network architecture can outperform the least squares (LS) method with a relatively smaller training overhead and online computational complexity.

Thijs van de Laar, Ismail Senoz, Ayça Özçelikkale et al.

Active Inference (ActInf) is an emerging theory that explains perception and action in biological agents, in terms of minimizing a free energy bound on Bayesian surprise. Goal-directed behavior is elicited by introducing prior beliefs on the underlying generative model. In contrast to prior beliefs, which constrain all realizations of a random variable, we propose an alternative approach through chance constraints, which allow for a (typically small) probability of constraint violation, and demonstrate how such constraints can be used as intrinsic drivers for goal-directed behavior in ActInf. We illustrate how chance-constrained ActInf weights all imposed (prior) constraints on the generative model, allowing e.g., for a trade-off between robust control and empirical chance constraint violation. Secondly, we interpret the proposed solution within a message passing framework. Interestingly, the message passing interpretation is not only relevant to the context of ActInf, but also provides a general purpose approach that can account for chance constraints on graphical models. The chance constraint message updates can then be readily combined with other pre-derived message update rules, without the need for custom derivations. The proposed chance-constrained message passing framework thus accelerates the search for workable models in general, and can be used to complement message-passing formulations on generative neural models.

John Moberg, Lennart Svensson, Juliano Pinto et al.

A simple approach to obtaining uncertainty-aware neural networks for regression is to do Bayesian linear regression (BLR) on the representation from the last hidden layer. Recent work [Riquelme et al., 2018, Azizzadenesheli et al., 2018] indicates that the method is promising, though it has been limited to homoscedastic noise. In this paper, we propose a novel variation that enables the method to flexibly model heteroscedastic noise. The method is benchmarked against two prominent alternative methods on a set of standard datasets, and finally evaluated as an uncertainty-aware model in model-based reinforcement learning. Our experiments indicate that the method is competitive with standard ensembling, and ensembles of BLR outperforms the methods we compared to.

Shen Li, Christian Häger, Nil Garcia et al.

Machine learning is used to compute achievable information rates (AIRs) for a simplified fiber channel. The approach jointly optimizes the input distribution (constellation shaping) and the auxiliary channel distribution to compute AIRs without explicit channel knowledge in an end-to-end fashion.

Florian Meyer, Henk Wymeersch, Markus Fröhle et al.

We introduce a distributed, cooperative framework and method for Bayesian estimation and control in decentralized agent networks. Our framework combines joint estimation of time-varying global and local states with information-seeking control optimizing the behavior of the agents. It is suited to nonlinear and non-Gaussian problems and, in particular, to location-aware networks. For cooperative estimation, a combination of belief propagation message passing and consensus is used. For cooperative control, the negative posterior joint entropy of all states is maximized via a gradient ascent. The estimation layer provides the control layer with probabilistic information in the form of sample representations of probability distributions. Simulation results demonstrate intelligent behavior of the agents and excellent estimation performance for a simultaneous self-localization and target tracking problem. In a cooperative localization scenario with only one anchor, mobile agents can localize themselves after a short time with an accuracy that is higher than the accuracy of the performed distance measurements.