Effective outdoor pathloss prediction: A multi-layer segmentation approach with weighting map

Predicting pathloss by considering the physical environment is crucial for effective wireless network planning. Traditional methods, such as ray tracing and model-based approaches, often face challenges due to high computational complexity and discrepancies between models and real-world environments. In contrast, deep learning has emerged as a promising alternative, offering accurate path loss predictions with reduced computational complexity. In our research, we introduce a ResNet-based model designed to enhance path loss prediction. We employ innovative techniques to capture key features of the environment by generating transmission (Tx) and reception (Rx) depth maps, as well as a distance map from the geographic data. Recognizing the significant attenuation caused by signal reflection and diffraction, particularly at high frequencies, we have developed a weighting map that emphasizes the areas adjacent to the direct path between Tx and Rx for path loss prediction. {Extensive simulations demonstrate that our model outperforms PPNet, RPNet, and Vision Transformer (ViT) by 1.2-3.0 dB using dataset of ITU challenge 2024 and ICASSP 2023. In addition, the floating point operations (FLOPs) of the proposed model is 60\% less than those of benchmarks.} Additionally, ablation studies confirm that the inclusion of the weighting map significantly enhances prediction performance.

Invisible Walls: Privacy-Preserving ISAC Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

The environmental and target-related information inherently carried in wireless signals, such as channel state information (CSI), has brought increasing attention to integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). However, it also raises pressing concerns about privacy leakage through eavesdropping. While existing efforts have attempted to mitigate this issue, they either fail to account for the needs of legitimate communication and sensing users or rely on hardware with high complexity and cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose PrivISAC, a plug-and-play, low-cost solution that leverages RIS to protect user privacy while preserving ISAC performance. At the core of PrivISAC is a novel strategy in which each RIS row is assigned two distinct beamforming vectors, from which we deliberately construct a limited set of RIS configurations. During operation, exactly one configuration is randomly activated at each time slot to introduce additional perturbations, effectively masking sensitive sensing information from unauthorized eavesdroppers. To jointly ensure privacy protection and communication performance, we design the two vectors such that their responses remain nearly identical in the communication direction, thereby preserving stable, high-throughput transmission, while exhibiting pronounced differences in the sensing direction, which introduces sufficient perturbations to thwart eavesdroppers. Additionally, to enable legitimate sensing under such randomized configurations, we introduce a time-domain masking and demasking method that allows the authorized receiver to associate each CSI sample with its underlying configuration and eliminate configuration-induced discrepancies, thereby recovering valid CSI. We implement PrivISAC on commodity wireless devices and experiment results show that PrivISAC provides strong privacy protection while preserving high-quality legitimate ISAC.

State Backdoor: Towards Stealthy Real-world Poisoning Attack on Vision-Language-Action Model in State Space

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are widely deployed in safety-critical embodied AI applications such as robotics. However, their complex multimodal interactions also expose new security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we investigate a backdoor threat in VLA models, where malicious inputs cause targeted misbehavior while preserving performance on clean data. Existing backdoor methods predominantly rely on inserting visible triggers into visual modality, which suffer from poor robustness and low insusceptibility in real-world settings due to environmental variability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the State Backdoor, a novel and practical backdoor attack that leverages the robot arm's initial state as the trigger. To optimize trigger for insusceptibility and effectiveness, we design a Preference-guided Genetic Algorithm (PGA) that efficiently searches the state space for minimal yet potent triggers. Extensive experiments on five representative VLA models and five real-world tasks show that our method achieves over 90% attack success rate without affecting benign task performance, revealing an underexplored vulnerability in embodied AI systems.

Federated Customization of Large Models: Approaches, Experiments, and Insights

In this article, we explore federated customization of large models and highlight the key challenges it poses within the federated learning framework. We review several popular large model customization techniques, including full fine-tuning, efficient fine-tuning, prompt engineering, prefix-tuning, knowledge distillation, and retrieval-augmented generation. Then, we discuss how these techniques can be implemented within the federated learning framework. Moreover, we conduct experiments on federated prefix-tuning, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first trial to apply prefix-tuning in the federated learning setting. The conducted experiments validate its feasibility with performance close to centralized approaches. Further comparison with three other federated customization methods demonstrated its competitive performance, satisfactory efficiency, and consistent robustness.

Chirp Delay-Doppler Domain Modulation Based Joint Communication and Radar for Autonomous Vehicles

This paper introduces a sensing-centric joint communication and millimeter-wave radar paradigm to facilitate collaboration among intelligent vehicles. We first propose a chirp waveform-based delay-Doppler quadrature amplitude modulation (DD-QAM) that modulates data across delay, Doppler, and amplitude dimensions. Building upon this modulation scheme, we derive its achievable rate to quantify the communication performance. We then introduce an extended Kalman filter-based scheme for four-dimensional (4D) parameter estimation in dynamic environments, enabling the active vehicles to accurately estimate orientation and tangential-velocity beyond traditional 4D radar systems. Furthermore, in terms of communication, we propose a dual-compensation-based demodulation and tracking scheme that allows the passive vehicles to effectively demodulate data without compromising their sensing functions. Simulation results underscore the feasibility and superior performance of our proposed methods, marking a significant advancement in the field of autonomous vehicles. Simulation codes are provided to reproduce the results in this paper: \href{https://github.com/LiZhuoRan0/2026-IEEE-TWC-ChirpDelayDopplerModulationISAC}{https://github.com/LiZhuoRan0}.

Active RIS-Aided Anti-Jamming Wireless Communications: A Stackelberg Game Perspective

The pervasive threat of jamming attacks, particularly from adaptive jammers capable of optimizing their strategies, poses a significant challenge to the security and reliability of wireless communications. This paper addresses this issue by investigating anti-jamming communications empowered by an active reconfigurable intelligent surface. The strategic interaction between the legitimate system and the adaptive jammer is modeled as a Stackelberg game, where the legitimate user, acting as the leader, proactively designs its strategy while anticipating the jammer's optimal response. We prove the existence of the Stackelberg equilibrium and derive it using a backward induction method. Particularly, the jammer's optimal strategy is embedded into the leader's problem, resulting in a bi-level optimization that jointly considers legitimate transmit power, transmit/receive beamformers, and active reflection. We tackle this complex, non-convex problem by using a block coordinate descent framework, wherein subproblems are iteratively solved via convex relaxation and successive convex approximation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed active RIS-assisted scheme in enhancing legitimate transmissions and degrading jamming effects compared to baseline schemes across various scenarios. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining active RIS technology with a strategic game-theoretic framework for anti-jamming communications.

Simultaneous Secrecy and Covert Communications (SSACC) in Mobility-Aware RIS-Aided Networks

In this paper, we propose a simultaneous secrecy and covert communications (SSACC) scheme in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided network with a cooperative jammer. The scheme enhances communication security by maximizing the secrecy capacity and the detection error probability (DEP). Under a worst-case scenario for covert communications, we consider that the eavesdropper can optimally adjust the detection threshold to minimize the DEP. Accordingly, we derive closedform expressions for both average minimum DEP (AMDEP) and average secrecy capacity (ASC). To balance AMDEP and ASC, we propose a new performance metric and design an algorithm based on generative diffusion models (GDM) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The algorithm maximizes data rates under user mobility while ensuring high AMDEP and ASC by optimizing power allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves faster convergence and superior performance compared to conventional deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) methods, thereby validating its effectiveness in balancing security and capacity performance.

Agentic AI for Integrated Sensing and Communication: Analysis, Framework, and Case Study

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has emerged as a key development direction in the sixth-generation (6G) era, which provides essential support for the collaborative sensing and communication of future intelligent networks. However, as wireless environments become increasingly dynamic and complex, ISAC systems require more intelligent processing and more autonomous operation to maintain efficiency and adaptability. Meanwhile, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) offers a feasible solution to address these challenges by enabling continuous perception-reasoning-action loops in dynamic environments to support intelligent, autonomous, and efficient operation for ISAC systems. As such, we delve into the application value and prospects of agentic AI in ISAC systems in this work. Firstly, we provide a comprehensive review of agentic AI and ISAC systems to demonstrate their key characteristics. Secondly, we show several common optimization approaches for ISAC systems and highlight the significant advantages of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-based agentic AI. Thirdly, we propose a novel agentic ISAC framework and prensent a case study to verify its superiority in optimizing ISAC performance. Finally, we clarify future research directions for agentic AI-based ISAC systems.

GNN-Enabled Robust Hybrid Beamforming with Score-Based CSI Generation and Denoising

Accurate Channel State Information (CSI) is critical for Hybrid Beamforming (HBF) tasks. However, obtaining high-resolution CSI remains challenging in practical wireless communication systems. To address this issue, we propose to utilize Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and score-based generative models to enable robust HBF under imperfect CSI conditions. Firstly, we develop the Hybrid Message Graph Attention Network (HMGAT) which updates both node and edge features through node-level and edge-level message passing. Secondly, we design a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based Noise Conditional Score Network (NCSN) to learn the distribution of high-resolution CSI, facilitating CSI generation and data augmentation to further improve HMGAT's performance. Finally, we present a Denoising Score Network (DSN) framework and its instantiation, termed DeBERT, which can denoise imperfect CSI under arbitrary channel error levels, thereby facilitating robust HBF. Experiments on DeepMIMO urban datasets demonstrate the proposed models' superior generalization, scalability, and robustness across various HBF tasks with perfect and imperfect CSI.

Stackelberg Game-Driven Defense for ISAC Against Channel Attacks in Low-Altitude Networks

The increasing saturation of terrestrial resources has driven economic activities into low-altitude airspace. These activities, such as air taxis, rely on low-altitude wireless networks, and one key enabling technology is integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). However, in low-altitude airspace, ISAC is vulnerable to channel-access attacks, thereby degrading performance and threatening safety. To address this, we propose a defense framework based on a Stackelberg game. Specifically, we first model the system under attack, deriving metrics for the communication and the sensing to quantify performance. Then, we formulate the interaction as a three-player game where a malicious attacker acts as the leader, while the legitimate drone and ground base station act as followers. Using a backward induction algorithm, we obtain the Stackelberg equilibrium, allowing the defenders to dynamically adjust their strategies to mitigate the attack. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm converges to a stable solution and outperforms existing baselines, ensuring reliable ISAC performance for critical low-altitude applications.