Lina Pu

Yu Luo, Lina Pu, Aijun Song

This paper presents an underwater acoustic reconfigurable intelligent surface (UA-RIS) designed for long-range, high-speed, and environmentally friendly communication in oceanic environments. The proposed UA-RIS comprises multiple pairs of acoustic reflectors that utilize a synthetic reflection scheme to flexibly control the amplitude and phase of reflected waves. This capability enables precise beam steering to enhance or attenuate sound levels in specific directions. A prototype UA-RIS with 4*6 acoustic reflection units is constructed and tested in both tank and lake environments to evaluate performance. Experimental results using a continuous wave (CW) as the source signal demonstrate that the prototype is capable of effectively pointing reflected waves to targeted directions while minimizing side lobes through synthetic reflection. Field tests reveal that deploying the UA-RIS on the sender side considerably extends communication ranges by 28% in deep water and 46% in shallow waters. Furthermore, with a fixed communication distance, positioning the UA-RIS at the transmitter side substantially boosts the receiving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), with an average increase of 2.13 dB and peaks up to 2.92 dB. When positioned on the receiver side, the UA-RIS can expand the communication range in shallow and deep water environments by 40.6% and 66%, respectively. Moreover, placing the UA-RIS close to the receiver enhances SNR by an average of 2.56 dB, reaching up to 4.2 dB under certain circumstances.

Lina Pu, Yu Luo, Aijun Song

This article introduces a multilayered acoustic reconfigurable intelligent surface (ML-ARIS) architecture designed for the next generation of underwater communications. ML-ARIS incorporates multiple layers of piezoelectric material in each acoustic reflector, with the load impedance of each layer independently adjustable via a control circuit. This design increases the flexibility in generating reflected signals with desired amplitudes and orthogonal phases, enabling passive synthetic reflection using a single acoustic reflector. Such a feature enables precise beam steering, enhancing sound levels in targeted directions while minimizing interference in surrounding environments. Extensive simulations and tank experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility of ML-ARIS. The experimental results indicate that implementing synthetic reflection with a multilayer structure is indeed practical in real-world scenarios, making it possible to use a single reflection unit to generate reflected waves with high-resolution amplitudes and phases.

Long Li, Jiajia Li, Dong Chen et al.

Accurate classification plays a pivotal role in smart agriculture, enabling applications such as crop monitoring, fruit recognition, and pest detection. However, conventional centralized training often requires large-scale data collection, which raises privacy concerns, while standard federated learning struggles with non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and incurs high communication costs. To address these challenges, we propose a federated learning framework that integrates a frozen Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) vision transformer (ViT) with a lightweight transformer classifier. By leveraging the strong feature extraction capability of the pre-trained CLIP ViT, the framework avoids training large-scale models from scratch and restricts federated updates to a compact classifier, thereby reducing transmission overhead significantly. Furthermore, to mitigate performance degradation caused by non-IID data distribution, a small subset (1%) of CLIP-extracted feature representations from all classes is shared across clients. These shared features are non-reversible to raw images, ensuring privacy preservation while aligning class representation across participants. Experimental results on agricultural classification tasks show that the proposed method achieve 86.6% accuracy, which is more than 4 times higher compared to baseline federated learning approaches. This demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of combining vision-language model features with federated learning for privacy-preserving and scalable agricultural intelligence.

Long Li, Jiajia Li, Dong Chen et al.

In modern smart agriculture, object detection plays a crucial role by enabling automation, precision farming, and monitoring of resources. From identifying crop health and pest infestations to optimizing harvesting processes, accurate object detection enhances both productivity and sustainability. However, training object detection models often requires large-scale data collection and raises privacy concerns, particularly when sensitive agricultural data is distributed across farms. To address these challenges, we propose VLLFL, a vision-language model-based lightweight federated learning framework (VLLFL). It harnesses the generalization and context-aware detection capabilities of the vision-language model (VLM) and leverages the privacy-preserving nature of federated learning. By training a compact prompt generator to boost the performance of the VLM deployed across different farms, VLLFL preserves privacy while reducing communication overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that VLLFL achieves 14.53% improvement in the performance of VLM while reducing 99.3% communication overhead. Spanning tasks from identifying a wide variety of fruits to detecting harmful animals in agriculture, the proposed framework offers an efficient, scalable, and privacy-preserving solution specifically tailored to agricultural applications.