smart home device manufacturers

Abstract: Current wireless communication systems are designed based on channel models obtained under the assumption of far-field operation, where electromagnetic waves can be approximated by a planar wave. In those circumstances, dualpolarized antennas seem to be the optimal solution for maximizing the spectral efficiency. However, the recent research on XLMIMO systems represents a paradigm shift, since communication may take place in the near-field and an additional degree of freedom can be achieved. This work presents a modular, lowcost tripolarized antenna at 2.4 GHz band, that is used to experimentally validate theoretical findings about tripolarized antennas, which are commonly based on orthogonal infinitesimal dipoles. The evaluation is carried out in two indoor scenarios and one outdoor scenario, with transmitter comprising multiple tripolarized antennas and a receiver equipped with a single tripolarized antenna. We show that this type of antenna can increase the number of spatial streams up to three or extend the region where terminals are able to achieve two spatial streams

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable robots to follow instructions in typed text, limiting broader deployment in natural speech. The traditional solution by prepending a speech recognition before VLA to convert speech into texts would incur additional latency and propagate errors. To address this, we present Speech-$π_{0.5}$, which maps raw speech directly to motor commands without explicit textual transcriptions. Specifically, built on $π_{0.5}$, we use a cross-modal projection to convert voice frames directly into audio tokens with significant response latency reduction. To further improve the accuracy, we adopt split LoRA adaptation with dedicated audio and task adapters, under a two-stage training. Speech-$π_{0.5}$ achieves $3\times$ lower response latency than ASR pipeline while maintaining competitive task success on LIBERO, and generalizes robustly to unseen accents where a single adapter degrades significantly.

Abstract: Smart meter (SM) data provides fine-grained visibility into household energy consumption, but also exposes users to privacy risks. Inference attacks, known as non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), can perform appliance-level inference from aggregate signals and recover sensitive behavioral patterns. In practice, attacker models are unknown and heterogeneous, making robust defense challenging. We formulate SM privacy protection as a black-box inference defense problem, aiming to reduce the recoverability of appliance-level information while generalizing across diverse and unseen attackers. We propose a proxy-guided hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that learns battery-based load-shaping policies to inject realistic but misleading appliance-level signatures into the aggregate signal, thereby disrupting the structured patterns exploited by NILM. A self-supervised aggregate-structure privacy probe provides a reconstruction-error-based surrogate reward for disrupting recoverable load structure, while a signature library makes the perturbations appliance-relevant and physically realizable through battery control. We provide theoretical rationale showing that proxy-guided optimization improves inference robustness under attacker diversity. Experiments on real-world datasets UK-DALE and REDD demonstrate strong cross-model and cross-appliance generalization. Across six unseen NILM attackers, covering four appliances on UK-DALE and five on REDD, our proposed defense increases average appliance-level RMSE by 107% and 166%, respectively, while reducing F1 score by 79% and 80%.

Abstract: False wake-up activations remain a persistent challenge in conversational AI. Speech phonetically similar to a device's wake word can produce a syntactically valid and semantically coherent ASR transcript that the assistant incorrectly executes. Most existing systems make a single intent decision in isolation, without a mechanism to learn from recurring errors over time or adapt to individual users through personalized learning. We introduce the Feedback-Driven Adaptive Self-Correcting Inference Layer (ASCIL), a complementary post-ASR correction framework that re-evaluates wake-up intent before response generation by fusing acoustic embeddings, linguistic cues, device context, and patterns from past misclassifications. ASCIL interprets implicit signals, including hesitation, disengagement, and silence, and explicit signals, including cancellation and repetition, as automatically inferred, noisy behavioral indicators of potential misclassification. These signals drive online pattern updates without manual annotation, whereas the intentional/unintentional reference labels used for offline evaluation are human-annotated. It generalizes from prior errors, applies corrective adjustments at inference time, and continuously updates in parallel with natural-language execution. Evaluated on a proprietary dataset of 3,667 interactions with human-annotated intentional/unintentional reference labels spanning 14 acoustic and contextual conditions, ASCIL achieves 54.27% relative error reduction on a session-disjoint subset constructed from baseline failures, and up to 24.39% relative error reduction at threshold 0.90 on the issue-tagged evaluation slice. These gains are achieved while improving intentional acceptance rates, with a median added latency below 60 ms in the reported benchmark.