Towards Optimal Semantic Communications: Reconsidering the Role of Semantic Feature Channels

This paper investigates the optimization of transmitting the encoder outputs, termed semantic features (SFs), in semantic communication (SC). We begin by modeling the entire communication process from the encoder output to the decoder input, encompassing the physical channel and all transceiver operations, as the SF channel, thereby establishing an encoder-SF channel-decoder pipeline. In contrast to prior studies that assume a fixed SF channel, we note that the SF channel is configurable, as its characteristics are shaped by various transmission and reception strategies, such as power allocation. Based on this observation, we formulate the SF channel optimization problem under a mutual information constraint between the SFs and their reconstructions, and analytically derive the optimal SF channel under a linear encoder-decoder structure and Gaussian source assumption. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we propose a joint optimization framework for the encoder-decoder and SF channel, applicable to both analog and digital SCs. To realize the optimized SF channel, we also propose a physical-layer calibration strategy that enables real-time power control and adaptation to varying channel conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SF channel optimization achieves superior task performance under various communication environments.

LocDreamer: World Model-Based Learning for Joint Indoor Tracking and Anchor Scheduling

Accurate, resource-efficient localization and tracking enables numerous location-aware services in next-generation wireless networks. However, existing machine learning-based methods often require large labeled datasets while overlooking spectrum and energy efficiencies. To fill this gap, we propose LocDreamer, a world model (WM)-based framework for joint target tracking and scheduling of localization anchors. LocDreamer learns a WM that captures the latent representation of the target motion and localization environment, thereby generating synthetic measurements to imagine arbitrary anchor deployments. These measurements enable imagination-driven training of both the tracking model and the reinforcement learning (RL)-based anchor scheduler that activates only the most informative anchors, which significantly reduce energy and signaling costs while preserving high tracking accuracy. Experiments on a real-world indoor dataset demonstrate that LocDreamer substantially improves data efficiency and generalization, outperforming conventional Bayesian filter with random scheduling by 37% in tracking accuracy, and achieving 86% of the accuracy of same model trained directly on real data.

Joint Laser Inter-Satellite Link Matching and Traffic Flow Routing in LEO Mega-Constellations via Lagrangian Duality

Low Earth orbit (LEO) mega-constellations greatly extend the coverage and resilience of future wireless systems. Within the mega-constellations, laser inter-satellite links (LISLs) enable high-capacity, long-range connectivity. Existing LISL schemes often overlook mechanical limitations of laser communication terminals (LCTs) and non-uniform global traffic profiles caused by uneven user and gateway distributions, leading to suboptimal throughput and underused LCTs/LISLs -- especially when each satellite carries only a few LCTs. This paper investigates the joint optimization of LCT connections and traffic routing to maximize the constellation throughput, considering the realistic LCT mechanics and the global traffic profile. The problem is formulated as an NP-hard mixed-integer program coupling LCT connections with flow-rate variables under link capacity constraints. Due to its intractability, we resort to relaxing the coupling constraints via Lagrangian duality, decomposing the problem into a weighted graph-matching for LCT connections, weighted shortest-path routing tasks, and a linear program for rate allocation. Here, Lagrange multipliers reflect congestion weights between satellites, jointly guiding the matching, routing, and rate allocation. Subgradient descent optimizes the multipliers, with provable convergence. Simulations using real-world constellation and terrestrial data show that our methods substantially improve network throughput by up to $35\%$--$145\%$ over existing non-joint approaches.

Duality-Guided Graph Learning for Real-Time Joint Connectivity and Routing in LEO Mega-Constellations

Laser inter-satellite links (LISLs) of low Earth orbit (LEO) mega-constellations enable high-capacity backbone connectivity in non-terrestrial networks, but their management is challenged by limited laser communication terminals, mechanical pointing constraints, and rapidly time-varying network topologies. This paper studies the joint problem of LISL connection establishment, traffic routing, and flow-rate allocation under heterogeneous global traffic demand and gateway availability. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer optimization over large-scale, time-varying constellation graphs and develop a Lagrangian dual decomposition that interprets per-link dual variables as congestion prices coordinating connectivity and routing decisions. To overcome the prohibitive latency of iterative dual updates, we propose DeepLaDu, a Lagrangian duality-guided deep learning framework that trains a graph neural network (GNN) to directly infer per-link (edge-level) congestion prices from the constellation state in a single forward pass. We enable scalable and stable training using a subgradient-based edge-level loss in DeepLaDu. We analyze the convergence and computational complexity of the proposed approach and evaluate it using realistic Starlink-like constellations with optical and traffic constraints. Simulation results show that DeepLaDu achieves up to 20\% higher network throughput than non-joint or heuristic baselines, while matching the performance of iterative dual optimization with orders-of-magnitude lower computation time, suitable for real-time operation in dynamic LEO networks.

Vision-Language-Model-Guided Differentiable Ray Tracing for Fast and Accurate Multi-Material RF Parameter Estimation

Accurate radio-frequency (RF) material parameters are essential for electromagnetic digital twins in 6G systems, yet gradient-based inverse ray tracing (RT) remains sensitive to initialization and costly under limited measurements. This paper proposes a vision-language-model (VLM) guided framework that accelerates and stabilizes multi-material parameter estimation in a differentiable RT (DRT) engine. A VLM parses scene images to infer material categories and maps them to quantitative priors via an ITU-R material table, yielding informed conductivity initializations. The VLM further selects informative transmitter/receiver placements that promote diverse, material-discriminative paths. Starting from these priors, the DRT performs gradient-based refinement using measured received signal strengths. Experiments in NVIDIA Sionna on indoor scenes show 2-4$\times$ faster convergence and 10-100$\times$ lower final parameter error compared with uniform or random initialization and random placement baselines, achieving sub-0.1\% mean relative error with only a few receivers. Complexity analyses indicate per-iteration time scales near-linearly with the number of materials and measurement setups, while VLM-guided placement reduces the measurements required for accurate recovery. Ablations over RT depth and ray counts confirm further accuracy gains without significant per-iteration overhead. Results demonstrate that semantic priors from VLMs effectively guide physics-based optimization for fast and reliable RF material estimation.

Context-Aware Iterative Token Detection and Masked Transmission for Wireless Token Communication

The success of large-scale language models has established tokens as compact and meaningful units for natural-language representation, which motivates token communication over wireless channels, where tokens are considered fundamental units for wireless transmission. We propose a context-aware token communication framework that uses a pretrained masked language model (MLM) as a shared contextual probability model between the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx). At Rx, we develop an iterative token detection method that jointly exploits MLM-guided contextual priors and channel observations based on a Bayesian perspective. At Tx, we additionally introduce a context-aware masking strategy which skips highly predictable token transmission to reduce transmission rate. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves reconstructed sentence quality and supports effective rate adaptation under various channel conditions.

Reinforcement Learning for Opportunistic Routing in Software-Defined LEO-Terrestrial Systems

The proliferation of large-scale low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations is driving the need for intelligent routing strategies that can effectively deliver data to terrestrial networks under rapidly time-varying topologies and intermittent gateway visibility. Leveraging the global control capabilities of a geostationary (GEO)-resident software-defined networking (SDN) controller, we introduce opportunistic routing, which aims to minimize delivery delay by forwarding packets to any currently available ground gateways rather than fixed destinations. This makes it a promising approach for achieving low-latency and robust data delivery in highly dynamic LEO networks. Specifically, we formulate a constrained stochastic optimization problem and employ a residual reinforcement learning framework to optimize opportunistic routing for reducing transmission delay. Simulation results over multiple days of orbital data demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in queue length reduction compared to classical backpressure and other well-known queueing algorithms.

Rethinking Secure Semantic Communications in the Age of Generative and Agentic AI: Threats and Opportunities

Semantic communication (SemCom) improves communication efficiency by transmitting task-relevant information instead of raw bits and is expected to be a key technology for 6G networks. Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI) further enhance SemCom by enabling robust semantic encoding and decoding under limited channel conditions. However, these efficiency gains also introduce new security and privacy vulnerabilities. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, eavesdroppers can also use powerful GenAI-based semantic decoders to recover private information from intercepted signals. Moreover, rapid advances in agentic AI enable eavesdroppers to perform long-term and adaptive inference through the integration of memory, external knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. This allows eavesdroppers to further infer user private behavior and intent beyond the transmitted content. Motivated by these emerging challenges, this paper comprehensively rethinks the security and privacy of SemCom systems in the age of generative and agentic AI. We first present a systematic taxonomy of eavesdropping threat models in SemCom systems. Then, we provide insights into how GenAI and agentic AI can enhance eavesdropping threats. Meanwhile, we also highlight potential opportunities for leveraging GenAI and agentic AI to design privacy-preserving SemCom systems.

Draft and Refine with Visual Experts

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal reasoning abilities, they often produce ungrounded or hallucinated responses because they rely too heavily on linguistic priors instead of visual evidence. This limitation highlights the absence of a quantitative measure of how much these models actually use visual information during reasoning. We propose Draft and Refine (DnR), an agent framework driven by a question-conditioned utilization metric. The metric quantifies the model's reliance on visual evidence by first constructing a query-conditioned relevance map to localize question-specific cues and then measuring dependence through relevance-guided probabilistic masking. Guided by this metric, the DnR agent refines its initial draft using targeted feedback from external visual experts. Each expert's output (such as boxes or masks) is rendered as visual cues on the image, and the model is re-queried to select the response that yields the largest improvement in utilization. This process strengthens visual grounding without retraining or architectural changes. Experiments across VQA and captioning benchmarks show consistent accuracy gains and reduced hallucination, demonstrating that measuring visual utilization provides a principled path toward more interpretable and evidence-driven multimodal agent systems.

Learning Time-Varying Graph Signals via Koopman

A wide variety of real-world data, such as sea measurements, e.g., temperatures collected by distributed sensors and multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) trajectories, can be naturally represented as graphs, often exhibiting non-Euclidean structures. These graph representations may evolve over time, forming time-varying graphs. Effectively modeling and analyzing such dynamic graph data is critical for tasks like predicting graph evolution and reconstructing missing graph data. In this paper, we propose a framework based on the Koopman autoencoder (KAE) to handle time-varying graph data. Specifically, we assume the existence of a hidden non-linear dynamical system, where the state vector corresponds to the graph embedding of the time-varying graph signals. To capture the evolving graph structures, the graph data is first converted into a vector time series through graph embedding, representing the structural information in a finite-dimensional latent space. In this latent space, the KAE is applied to learn the underlying non-linear dynamics governing the temporal evolution of graph features, enabling both prediction and reconstruction tasks.