SPOT: Single-Shot Positioning via Trainable Near-Field Rainbow Beamforming

Phase-time arrays, which integrate phase shifters (PSs) and true-time delays (TTDs), have emerged as a cost-effective architecture for generating frequency-dependent rainbow beams in wideband sensing and localization. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning-based scheme that simultaneously designs the rainbow beams and estimates user positions. Treating the PS and TTD coefficients as trainable variables allows the network to synthesize task-oriented beams that maximize localization accuracy. A lightweight fully connected module then recovers the user's angle-range coordinates from its feedback of the maximum quantized received power and its corresponding subcarrier index after a single downlink transmission. Compared with existing analytical and learning-based schemes, the proposed method reduces overhead by an order of magnitude and delivers consistently lower two-dimensional positioning error.

MARBLE-Net: Learning to Localize in Multipath Environment with Adaptive Rainbow Beams

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems demand precise and efficient target localization, a task challenged by rich multipath propagation in complex wireless environments. This paper introduces MARBLE-Net (Multipath-Aware Rainbow Beam Learning Network), a deep learning framework that jointly optimizes the analog beamforming parameters of a frequency-dependent rainbow beam and a neural localization network for high-accuracy position estimation. By treating the phase-shifter (PS) and true-time-delay (TTD) parameters as learnable weights, the system adaptively refines its sensing beam to exploit environment-specific multipath characteristics. A structured multi-stage training strategy is proposed to ensure stable convergence and effective end-to-end optimization. Simulation results show that MARBLE-Net outperforms both a fixed-beam deep learning baseline (RaiNet) and a traditional k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) method, reducing localization error by more than 50\% in a multipath-rich scene. Moreover, the results reveal a nuanced interaction with multipath propagation: while confined uni-directional multipath degrades accuracy, structured and directional multipath can be effectively exploited to achieve performance surpassing even line-of-sight (LoS) conditions.

CFARNet: Learning-Based High-Resolution Multi-Target Detection for Rainbow Beam Radar

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) OFDM radar equipped with rainbow beamforming, enabled by joint phase-time arrays (JPTAs), provides wide-angle coverage and is well-suited for fast real-time target detection and tracking. However, accurate detection of multiple closely spaced targets remains a key challenge for conventional signal processing pipelines, particularly those relying on constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors. This paper presents CFARNet, a learning-based processing framework that replaces CFAR with a convolutional neural network (CNN) for peak detection in the angle-Doppler domain. The network predicts target subcarrier indices, which guide angle estimation via a known frequency-angle mapping and enable high-resolution range and velocity estimation using the MUSIC algorithm. Extensive simulations demonstrate that CFARNet significantly outperforms a CFAR+MUSIC baseline, especially under low transmit power and dense multi-target conditions. The proposed method offers superior angular resolution, enhanced robustness in low-SNR scenarios, and improved computational efficiency, highlighting the potential of data-driven approaches for high-resolution mmWave radar sensing.

Hybrid Near/Far-Field Frequency-Dependent Beamforming via Joint Phase-Time Arrays

Joint phase-time arrays (JPTA) emerge as a cost-effective and energy-efficient architecture for frequency-dependent beamforming in wideband communications by utilizing both true-time delay units and phase shifters. This paper exploits the potential of JPTA to simultaneously serve multiple users in both near- and far-field regions with a single radio frequency chain. The goal is to jointly optimize JPTA-based beamforming and subband allocation to maximize overall system performance. To this end, we formulate a system utility maximization problem, including sum-rate maximization and proportional fairness as special cases. We develop a 3-step alternating optimization (AO) algorithm and an efficient deep learning (DL) method for this problem. The DL approach includes a 2-layer convolutional neural network, a 3-layer graph attention network (GAT), and a normalization module for resource and beamforming optimization. The GAT efficiently captures the interactions between resource allocation and analog beamformers. Simulation results confirm that JPTA outperforms conventional phased arrays (PA) in enhancing user rate and strikes a good balance between PA and fully-digital approach in energy efficiency. Employing a logarithmic utility function for user rates ensures greater fairness than maximizing sum-rates. Furthermore, the DL network achieves comparable performance to the AO approach, while having orders of magnitude lower computational complexity.