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Christopher Mutschler

Christopher Mutschler contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

12 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Active Sensing with Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Emitter Localization from RF Observations

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) interference poses a serious threat to reliable positioning, especially in indoor and multipath-rich environments where source localization is highly challenging. In this paper, we formulate GNSS interference localization as an active sensing problem and propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework in which an agent sequentially explores the environment to infer the position of an emitter source from radio frequency (RF) observations acquired with a 2x2 patch antenna. The localization task is modeled as a partially observable decision process, since single-snapshot measurements are often ambiguous under multipath propagation and changing channel conditions. To address this, the proposed framework combines high-dimensional RF sensing with deep RL and recurrent policy learning. We investigate both value-based and policy-based approaches, namely Deep Q-Networks (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and study their behavior under domain shift. The approach is evaluated on a simulated dataset generated with the Sionna ray-tracing module, which provides realistic propagation effects and diverse environment configurations. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a localization success rate of 80.1%, demonstrating the potential of RL for adaptive GNSS interference localization. Overall, the results highlight simulation-assisted training as a promising direction for robust interference localization in challenging propagation environments.

preprint2026arXiv

Exploitation of Hidden Context in Dynamic Movement Forecasting: A Neural Network Journey from Recurrent to Graph Neural Networks and General Purpose Transformers

Forecasting within signal processing pipelines is crucial for mitigating delays, particularly in predicting the dynamic movements of objects such as NBA players. This task poses significant challenges due to the inherently interactive and unpredictable nature of sports, where abrupt changes in velocity and direction are prevalent. Traditional approaches, including (S)ARIMA(X), Kalman filters (KF), and Particle filters (PF), often struggle to model the non-linear dynamics present in such scenarios. Machine learning (ML) methods, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, graph neural networks (GNNs), and Transformers, offer greater flexibility and accuracy but frequently fail to explicitly capture the interplay between temporal dependencies and contextual interactions, which are critical in chaotic sports environments. In this paper, we evaluate these models and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Experimental results reveal key performance trade-offs across input history length, generalizability, and the ability to incorporate contextual information. ML-based methods demonstrated substantial improvements over linear models across forecast horizons of up to 2s. Among the tested architectures, our hybrid LSTM augmented with contextual information achieved the lowest final displacement error (FDE) of 1.51m, outperforming temporal convolutional neural network (TCNN), graph attention network (GAT), and Transformers, while also requiring less data and training time compared to GAT and Transformers. Our findings indicate that no single architecture excels across all metrics, emphasizing the need for task-specific considerations in trajectory prediction for fast-paced, dynamic environments such as NBA gameplay.

preprint2026arXiv

GenAI for Energy-Efficient and Interference-Aware Compressed Sensing of GNSS Signals on a Google Edge TPU

Traditional methods for classifying global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming signals typically involve post-processing raw or spectral data streams, requiring complex and costly data transmission to cloud-based interference classification systems. In contrast, our proposed approach efficiently compresses GNSS data streams directly at the hardware receiver while simultaneously classifying jamming and spoofing attacks in real time. Given the growing prevalence of GNSS jamming, there is a critical need for real-time solutions suitable for power-constrained environments. This paper introduces a novel method for compressing and classifying GNSS jamming threats using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically variational autoencoders (VAEs), deployed on Google Edge tensor processing units (TPUs). The study evaluates various autoencoder (AE) architectures to compress and reconstruct GNSS signals, focusing on preserving interference characteristics while minimizing data size near the receiver hardware. The pipeline adapts large-scale AE models for Google Edge TPUs through 8-bit quantization to ensure energy-efficient deployment. Tests on raw in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) data, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) data, and handcrafted features show the system achieves significant compression (>42x) and accurate classification of approximately 72 interference types on reconstructed signals (F2-score 0.915), closely matching the original signals (F2-score 0.923). The hardware-centric GenAI approach also substantially reduces jammer signal transmission costs, offering a practical solution for interference mitigation. Ablation studies on conditional and factorized VAEs (i.e., FactorVAE) explore latent feature disentanglement for data generation, enhancing model interpretability and fostering trust in machine learning (ML) solutions for sensitive interference applications.

preprint2026arXiv

PDRNN: Modular Data-driven Pedestrian Dead Reckoning on Loosely Coupled Radio- and Inertial-Signalstreams

Modern pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) systems rely on fusing noisy and biased estimates of position, velocity, and calibrated orientation derived from loosely coupled sensors to determine the current pose of a localized object. However, discrepancies in the sampling rates of sensor-specific estimation methods and unreliable transmission pose significant challenges. And traditional methods often fail to effectively fuse multimodal sensor data during dynamic movements characterized by high accelerations, velocities, and rapidly varying orientations. To address these limitations, we propose a simple recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture capable of implicitly forecasting asynchronous sensor data streams from diverse estimation methods along reference trajectories. The proposed approach introduces PDRNN, a modular hybrid AI-assisted PDR system that handles each component as an independent ensemble of machine learning (ML) models to estimate both key parameter means and variances. Separate ML-based models are employed to estimate orientation, (un)directed velocity or distance from acceleration and gyroscope data, with optional absolute positioning from synchronized radio systems such as 5G for stabilization. A final fusion model combines these outputs, position, velocity, and orientation, while using uncertainty estimates to enhance system robustness. The modular design allows individual components to be updated, fine-tuned, or replaced without affecting the entire system. Experiments on dynamic sports movement data show that PDRNN achieves superior accuracy and precision compared to classic and ML-based methods, effectively avoiding error accumulation common in black-box approaches. And PDRNN offers forecast capabilities and better component control despite increased system complexity.

preprint2022arXiv

An Introduction to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning and Review of its Application to Autonomous Mobility

Many scenarios in mobility and traffic involve multiple different agents that need to cooperate to find a joint solution. Recent advances in behavioral planning use Reinforcement Learning to find effective and performant behavior strategies. However, as autonomous vehicles and vehicle-to-X communications become more mature, solutions that only utilize single, independent agents leave potential performance gains on the road. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a research field that aims to find optimal solutions for multiple agents that interact with each other. This work aims to give an overview of the field to researchers in autonomous mobility. We first explain MARL and introduce important concepts. Then, we discuss the central paradigms that underlie MARL algorithms, and give an overview of state-of-the-art methods and ideas in each paradigm. With this background, we survey applications of MARL in autonomous mobility scenarios and give an overview of existing scenarios and implementations.

preprint2022arXiv

Complementary Semi-Deterministic Clusters for Realistic Statistical Channel Models for Positioning

Positioning benefits from channel models that capture geometric effects and, in particular, from the signal properties of the first arriving path and the spatial consistency of the propagation condition of multiple links. The models that capture the physical effects observed in a realistic deployment scenario are essential for assessing the potential benefits of enhancements in positioning methods. Channel models based on ray-tracing simulations and statistical channel models, which are current state-of-the-art methods employed to evaluate performance of positioning in 3GPP systems, do not fully capture important aspects applicable to positioning. Hence, we propose an extension of existing statistical channel models with semi-deterministic clusters (SDCs). SDCs allow channels to be simulated using three types of clusters: fixed-, specular-, and random-clusters. Our results show that the proposed model aligns with measurements obtained in a real deployment scenario. Thus, our channel models can be used to develop advanced positioning solutions based on machine learning, which enable positioning with centimeter level accuracy in NLOS and multipath scenarios.

preprint2022arXiv

Driver Dojo: A Benchmark for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown to reach super human-level performance across a wide range of tasks. However, unlike supervised machine learning, learning strategies that generalize well to a wide range of situations remains one of the most challenging problems for real-world RL. Autonomous driving (AD) provides a multi-faceted experimental field, as it is necessary to learn the correct behavior over many variations of road layouts and large distributions of possible traffic situations, including individual driver personalities and hard-to-predict traffic events. In this paper we propose a challenging benchmark for generalizable RL for AD based on a configurable, flexible, and performant code base. Our benchmark uses a catalog of randomized scenario generators, including multiple mechanisms for road layout and traffic variations, different numerical and visual observation types, distinct action spaces, diverse vehicle models, and allows for use under static scenario definitions. In addition to purely algorithmic insights, our application-oriented benchmark also enables a better understanding of the impact of design decisions such as action and observation space on the generalizability of policies. Our benchmark aims to encourage researchers to propose solutions that are able to successfully generalize across scenarios, a task in which current RL methods fail. The code for the benchmark is available at https://github.com/seawee1/driver-dojo.

preprint2022arXiv

Efficient Beam Search for Initial Access Using Collaborative Filtering

Beamforming-capable antenna arrays overcome the high free-space path loss at higher carrier frequencies. However, the beams must be properly aligned to ensure that the highest power is radiated towards (and received by) the user equipment (UE). While there are methods that improve upon an exhaustive search for optimal beams by some form of hierarchical search, they can be prone to return only locally optimal solutions with small beam gains. Other approaches address this problem by exploiting contextual information, e.g., the position of the UE or information from neighboring base stations (BS), but the burden of computing and communicating this additional information can be high. Methods based on machine learning so far suffer from the accompanying training, performance monitoring and deployment complexity that hinders their application at scale. This paper proposes a novel method for solving the initial beam-discovery problem. It is scalable, and easy to tune and to implement. Our algorithm is based on a recommender system that associates groups (i.e., UEs) and preferences (i.e., beams from a codebook) based on a training data set. Whenever a new UE needs to be served our algorithm returns the best beams in this user cluster. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our approach, not only in single BS setups but also in setups that require a coordination among several BSs. Our method consistently outperforms standard baseline algorithms in the given task.

preprint2022arXiv

How to Learn from Risk: Explicit Risk-Utility Reinforcement Learning for Efficient and Safe Driving Strategies

Autonomous driving has the potential to revolutionize mobility and is hence an active area of research. In practice, the behavior of autonomous vehicles must be acceptable, i.e., efficient, safe, and interpretable. While vanilla reinforcement learning (RL) finds performant behavioral strategies, they are often unsafe and uninterpretable. Safety is introduced through Safe RL approaches, but they still mostly remain uninterpretable as the learned behaviour is jointly optimized for safety and performance without modeling them separately. Interpretable machine learning is rarely applied to RL. This paper proposes SafeDQN, which allows to make the behavior of autonomous vehicles safe and interpretable while still being efficient. SafeDQN offers an understandable, semantic trade-off between the expected risk and the utility of actions while being algorithmically transparent. We show that SafeDQN finds interpretable and safe driving policies for a variety of scenarios and demonstrate how state-of-the-art saliency techniques can help to assess both risk and utility.

preprint2022arXiv

Position Tracking using Likelihood Modeling of Channel Features with Gaussian Processes

Recent localization frameworks exploit spatial information of complex channel measurements (CMs) to estimate accurate positions even in multipath propagation scenarios. State-of-the art CM fingerprinting(FP)-based methods employ convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract the spatial information. However, they need spatially dense data sets (associated with high acquisition and maintenance efforts) to work well -- which is rarely the case in practical applications. If such data is not available (or its quality is low), we cannot compensate the performance degradation of CNN-based FP as they do not provide statistical position estimates, which prevents a fusion with other sources of information on the observation level. We propose a novel localization framework that adapts well to sparse datasets that only contain CMs of specific areas within the environment with strong multipath propagation. Our framework compresses CMs into informative features to unravel spatial information. It then regresses Gaussian processes (GPs) for each of them, which imply statistical observation models based on distance-dependent covariance kernels. Our framework combines the trained GPs with line-of-sight ranges and a dynamics model in a particle filter. Our measurements show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art CNN fingerprinting (0.52 m vs. 1.3 m MAE) on spatially sparse data collected in a realistic industrial indoor environment.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Realistic Statistical Channel Models For Positioning: Evaluating the Impact of Early Clusters

Physical effects such as reflection, refraction, and diffraction cause a radio signal to arrive from a transmitter to a receiver in multiple replicas that have different amplitude and rotation. Bandwidth-limited signals, such as positioning reference signals, have a limited time resolution. In reality, the signal is often reflected in the close vicinity of a transmitter and receiver, which causes the displacement of the observed peak from the true peak expected according to the line of sight (LOS) geometry between the transmitter and receiver. In this paper, we show that the existing channel model specified for performance evaluation within 3GPP fails to model the above phenomena. As a result, the simulation results deviate significantly from the measured values. Based on our measurement and simulation results, we propose a model for incorporating the signal reflection by obstacles in the vicinity of transmitter or receiver, so that the outcome of the model corresponds to the measurement made in such scenario.

preprint2020arXiv

ViPR: Visual-Odometry-aided Pose Regression for 6DoF Camera Localization

Visual Odometry (VO) accumulates a positional drift in long-term robot navigation tasks. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) improve VO in various aspects, VO still suffers from moving obstacles, discontinuous observation of features, and poor textures or visual information. While recent approaches estimate a 6DoF pose either directly from (a series of) images or by merging depth maps with optical flow (OF), research that combines absolute pose regression with OF is limited. We propose ViPR, a novel modular architecture for long-term 6DoF VO that leverages temporal information and synergies between absolute pose estimates (from PoseNet-like modules) and relative pose estimates (from FlowNet-based modules) by combining both through recurrent layers. Experiments on known datasets and on our own Industry dataset show that our modular design outperforms state of the art in long-term navigation tasks.