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5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.NI

Multistatic ISAC with Deep Learning-Based Clutter Suppression for 5G and Beyond

Yalin E. Sagduyu, Tugba Erpek, Sastry Kompella

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems using 5G and beyond signals of opportunity enable joint wireless sensing and communication using shared infrastructure and spectrum resources. While multistatic ISAC can increase sensing coverage with spatially distributed receivers, dense and dynamic clutter can significantly degrade bistatic range and Doppler estimation, leading to errors in target localization and velocity estimation. This paper presents a multistatic ISAC framework with clutter suppression for high-fidelity estimation of target position and velocity. Distributed clutter is modeled with randomly located scatterers with varying Doppler spreads and radar cross sections to capture dense and dynamic clutter effects. A broad range of conventional signal processing baselines are evaluated for clutter suppression, showing limited robustness under strong clutter conditions. To address this limitation, deep learning-based clutter suppression methods are introduced to improve robustness against dense and dynamic clutter by employing residual and attention-enhanced deep neural network architectures that directly enhance target responses from clutter-contaminated observations. These methods substantially outperform conventional approaches in target position and velocity estimation across diverse clutter conditions in multistatic ISAC.

#02Oct 29, 2026

cs.LG

Training Foundation Models with a Single Algorithm

Yuda Song, Alvin Zhang, Fahim Tajwar and 7 more

Foundation models are typically trained in stages: pretraining, midtraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL), with changes in both data and learning algorithms. We show that this algorithmic separation is not fundamental. By deriving suitable RL objectives as maximum-likelihood fitting to model-generated target distributions, we place all of these stages under a single likelihood-based training algorithm, unified training. This perspective turns the foundation-model training lifecycle into a problem of choosing which data to train on, in what proportions, and when, with conventional staged training as a special case. We instantiate this framework in a unified training system that mixes static data and RL generations within a single trainer. Across controlled and real-world experiments, unified training improves the accuracy-compute tradeoff and task coverage while preserving broader capabilities, and provides a stronger starting point for continual learning. This work lays the groundwork for a unified science of foundation-model training, connecting mathematical principles, training infrastructure, and the development of model capabilities.

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.LG

The Precision Wall: An Optimizer-Dependent Boundary for Optimization under Power-Law Measurement Spectra

Lngel Kyo

In low-rank matrix sensing of a rank-$D$ factor $U^\ast \in \mathbb{R}^{V \times D}$, replacing isotropic Gaussian designs with power-law measurement covariance $Σ= \mathrm{diag}(j^{-s})_{j=1}^V$ leaves the Burer--Monteiro landscape free of spurious local minima, yet division-normalised first-order optimizers stall above a critical exponent $s^\ast$. We trace this failure to a numerical precision wall. At the ground truth, the smallest non-gauge expected Hessian eigenvalue scales at leading order as $V^{-(s+1)}D^{-s}$. When this curvature drops below the effective denominator floor $ε_O$ of optimizer $O$, normalisation noise overwhelms rare-direction gradients, yielding the leading-order boundary $s^\ast_O(V, D) = [\log(1/ε_O) - \log V]/\log(VD) + δ_O$, where $δ_O$ is a metric-dependent detection lag. With $δ_{\mathrm{Adam}}$ calibrated on four configurations and frozen, this formula predicts Adam's onset within $0.45$ across all 16 cells of a held-out grid ($V \in \{64,128,256,512\} \times D \in \{4,8,16,32\}$), separates fixed-$VD$ pairs, and distinguishes denominator-precision walls from conditioning and sign-quantisation walls. The approximation fails at $D = 2$, reflects a finite-$D$ spectral crossover, and saturates below $\varepsilon_0 = 10^{-8}$ at a dynamical floor.

#04Oct 29, 2026

cs.CL

How I Aligned Your Model: Scaling Up Multilingual Safety Training with Templates

Max Neuwinger, Hanna Yukhymenko, Imanol Schlag

Safety alignment for Large Language Models is heavily focused on English with limited multilingual representation, particularly damaging low-resource language performance. Related open training datasets are often limited in size or do not follow region-localized harmful topics to broaden the scope of alignment beyond cultures. We propose a scalable template-based augmentation pipeline to produce massive multilingual refusal and benign corpora, extracting safe templates from harmful prompts, translating them and then filling in the slots with culturally authentic entities, both harmful and benign. As a result, we release MSafeTemp, a validated corpus spanning 60 languages useful for multilingual safety alignment and evaluation. Using the dataset, we show that English-only evaluation misjudges multilingual safety: for several models, attacks that fail in English succeed once translated, while culturally localized variants expose further failures that translation alone misses. We also confirm that augmenting safety training data through templates allows for higher diversity and quality of alignment, resulting in improved safety performance beyond English. MSafeTemp and the respective pipeline are aimed at facilitating research and development of safer and more responsible models for less-represented cultures.

#05Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Soil Moisture Estimation in Precision Agriculture: A Knowledge Distillation Approach

Mohammed Rakib, Vrinda Nagula, Arunkumar Bagavathi

Accurate soil moisture estimation is critical for precision agriculture, influencing irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting strategies. Traditional methods primarily rely on meteorological and soil property data, while recent approaches incorporate visual modalities such as aerial and geospatial imagery. However, these high-resolution images are expensive and computationally demanding to analyze. In this work, we propose Soil Moisture Distillation (SMD), a Knowledge Distillation (KD)-based multimodal learning framework that leverages unimodal teachers to enhance multimodal soil moisture estimation. SMD surpasses not only traditional multimodal fusion techniques, including MIS-ME, but also outperforms unimodal models, demonstrating the benefits of guided unimodal knowledge transfer. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of soil patches and crop images, showing that crop images provide superior visual cues, leading to improved prediction accuracy. SMD achieves a 2% improvement in MAPE for soil patches and 1.2% for crops over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging both meteorological and visual data through knowledge distillation for enhanced soil moisture forecasting.