Abstract:Radio frequency wireless power transfer (RF-WPT) is an enabling technology for supporting uninterrupted communications in future Internet of Things systems by reducing the need for battery replacement and mitigating battery-waste-related issues. For large-scale RF-WPT deployment, one of the main challenges is the scheduler-level resource allocation. Specifically, the transmitter must decide how much energy to deliver, when, and to whom, under limited charging resources, incomplete receiver-side information, and uncertain near-future charging conditions. This article positions generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a promising tool for this setting because it can foresee multiple plausible charging scenarios conditioned on coarse operational context and receiver-side information. We propose GenAI to act as an uncertainty-aware support layer for the RF-WPT scheduler rather than as a standalone forecasting or decision-making tool. To this end, we first revisit the main challenges of RF-WPT scheduling, and discuss how major GenAI families can support uncertainty-aware charging decisions by generating scenario-based inputs for downstream tasks. We then present a warehouse-style case study showing that preserving uncertainty through the sampling capability of generative models can improve robust charging decisions compared with deterministic prediction and simple non-learning baselines, especially under risk-sensitive objectives. Finally, we identify key open challenges and present some directions for future research.
Abstract:Speculative inference (SPIN) was originally developed as an efficient architecture to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose its distributed deployment to enable cooperative token generation in a multiuser edge system; its advantage is to effectively balance computational loads between resource-constrained devices and servers. The resulting architecture, termed Multi-access SPIN (Multi-SPIN), utilizes on-device small language models to generate and upload candidate token drafts, while an edge server operates the LLM to verify them in parallel batches. Given the severe heterogeneity in users' computation and communication capabilities, the draft length emerges as a critical control variable that influences node-level computation loads and multi-access latency, thereby governing the sum token goodput. Consequently, considering frequency-division multiple access, we investigate the problem of multi-access draft control, a joint optimization of draft-length control and bandwidth allocation to maximize sum token goodput. We examine two cases: (1) homogeneous draft lengths across users to facilitate server-side batching, and (2) heterogeneous draft lengths to introduce a new dimension for goodput enhancement. By developing decomposition methods, we reduce these complex optimizations into tractable sub-problems, which allow efficient draft control algorithms to be derived in closed form. Our analysis shows that the optimal bandwidth allocation compensates users with weaker computation-and-communication capabilities in the homogeneous case due to the batching synchronization requirements, whereas its heterogeneous-case counterpart rewards users with higher acceptance rates by relaxing such requirements. Experiments using Llama-2 and Qwen3.5 model pairs across diverse tasks demonstrate that Multi-SPIN improves goodput by up to 88% over heterogeneity-agnostic baselines.
Abstract:Measuring statistical dependency between high-dimensional random variables is a fundamental task in data science and machine learning. Neural mutual information (MI) estimators offer a promising avenue, but they typically require costly iterative optimization for each new dataset, making them impractical for real-time applications. We present InfoAtlas, a foundation model-like architecture that eliminates this bottleneck by directly inferring MI in a single forward pass. Pretrained on large-scale synthetic data with rich dependence patterns, InfoAtlas learns to identify diverse dependence structures and predict MI directly from the dataset. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that InfoAtlas matches state-of-the-art neural estimators in accuracy while achieving $100\times$ speedup, can flexibly handle varying dimensions and sample sizes through a single unified model, and generalizes effectively to complex, real-world scenarios. By reformulating MI estimation as an inference task, InfoAtlas establishes a foundation for real-time dependency analysis.
Abstract:Rydberg atomic quantum receivers have been seen as novel radio frequency measurements and the high sensitivity to a large range of frequencies makes it attractive for communications reception. However, their performance can be significantly degraded by hardware-induced noise, particularly the noise from laser, which impacts the overall system noise floor and exhibits correlation. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a weight hybrid (WH) architecture for Rydberg-atomic sensors, a novel four-channel combining scheme designed for atomic sensors operating in correlated noise environments. By jointly processing dual signal channels and dual noise reference channels, the WH architecture effectively mitigates noise contributions from lasers and other hardware components. All channels are optimally combined via maximum likelihood estimation within an expectation maximization framework, enabling robust signal extraction under correlated noise. Moreover, the proposed WH architecture is universal and can be readily extended to other types of Rydberg receivers to achieve consistent performance improvements.
Abstract:Near-field integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables object-level sensing from distance-dependent array responses, yet most existing near-field methods still rely on point-target models and realistic extended targets remain largely unexplored. In this paper, joint target classification and range-azimuth localization are studied from channel responses of realistic extended targets. A dual-branch inference framework is proposed. Semantic and geometric branches are used for classification and localization, respectively. Cross-task attention is introduced after task-specific encoding so that complementary cues can be exchanged without forcing full feature sharing from the input stage. To improve localization on the same backbone, uncertainty-aware regression and a physics-guided structured objective are adopted, including planar consistency, peak-response regularization, and geometry-coupling constraints. Training and evaluation data are generated from full-wave electromagnetic scattering simulations of voxelized vehicle targets with randomized heading angles, material contrasts, and placements. The compared variants show that cross-task attention mainly benefits classification, while uncertainty-aware and structured supervision are needed to recover strong localization performance on the same backbone. Under the adopted shared-OFDM benchmark, the proposed framework reaches the best joint operating point with fewer sensing tones for the same target performance region.
Abstract:Learning-based semantic communication (SemCom) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the transmission efficiency of wireless networks. However, existing methods typically rely on extensive end-to-end training, which is both inflexible and computationally expensive in dynamic wireless environments. Moreover, they fail to exploit redundancy across multiple transmissions of semantically similar content, limiting overall efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose a channel-aware generative adversarial network (GAN) inversion-based joint source-channel coding (CAGI-JSCC) framework that enables training-free SemCom by leveraging a pre-trained SemanticStyleGAN model. By explicitly incorporating wireless channel characteristics into the GAN inversion process, CAGI-JSCC adapts to varying channel conditions without additional training. Furthermore, we introduce a cache-enabled dynamic codebook (CDC) that caches disentangled semantic components at both the transmitter and receiver, allowing the system to reuse previously transmitted content. This semantic-level caching can continuously reduce redundant transmissions as experience accumulates. Extensive experiments on image transmission demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. In particular, our system achieves comparable perceptual quality with an average bandwidth compression ratio (BCR) of 1/224, and as low as 1/1024 for a single image, significantly outperforming baselines with a BCR of 1/128.
Abstract:A target recognition framework relying on near-field integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems is proposed. By exploiting the distance-dependent spatial signatures provided by the near-field spherical wavefront, high-accuracy sensing is realized in a bandwidth-efficient manner. A spatio--temporal--frequency (STF) transformer framework is introduced for target recognition using electromagnetic features found in the wireless channel response. In particular, a lightweight spatial encoder is employed to extract features from the antenna array for each frame and subcarrier. These features are then fused by a time-frequency transformer head with positional embeddings to model temporal dynamics and cross-subcarrier correlations. Simulation results demonstrate that strong target recognition performance can be achieved even with limited bandwidth resources.
Abstract:\emph{Integrated communication and computation} (IC$^2$) has emerged as a new paradigm for enabling efficient edge inference in sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, the design of IC$^2$ technologies is hindered by the lack of a tractable theoretical framework for characterizing \emph{end-to-end} (E2E) inference performance. The metric is highly complicated as it needs to account for both channel distortion and artificial intelligence (AI) model architecture and computational complexity. In this work, we address this challenge by developing a tractable analytical model for E2E inference accuracy and leveraging it to design a \emph{channel-adaptive AI} algorithm that maximizes inference throughput, referred to as the edge processing rate (EPR), under latency and accuracy constraints. Specifically, we consider an edge inference system in which a server deploys a backbone model with early exit, which enables flexible computational complexity, to perform inference on data features transmitted by a mobile device. The proposed accuracy model characterizes high-dimensional feature distributions in the angular domain using a Mixture of von Mises (MvM) distribution. This leads to a desired closed-form expression for inference accuracy as a function of quantization bit-width and model traversal depth, which represents channel distortion and computational complexity, respectively. Building upon this accuracy model, we formulate and solve the EPR maximization problem under joint latency and accuracy constraints, leading to a channel-adaptive AI algorithm that achieves full IC$^2$ integration. The proposed algorithm jointly adapts transmit-side feature compression and receive-side model complexity according to channel conditions to maximize overall efficiency and inference throughput. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance as compared with fixed-complexity counterparts.
Abstract:This paper presents the Quantum-Power pROfile Based Estimation (PROBE) framework, a Rydberg Atomic Receiver (RARE)-based multi-user angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation approach equipped with a radio-frequency (RF) lens front end. We establish a physics-consistent analytical model showing that magnitude-only RARE measurements, processed via the beam-propagation method (BPM) and snapshot-wise power accumulation, can be rigorously characterized as a nonnegative superposition of AoA-dependent, lens-induced spatial power profiles. This formulation reveals a structured and interpretable power-domain dictionary that enables multi-user AoA recovery without explicit phase reconstruction. Building on this foundation, we develop two complementary recovery strategies: (i) a principled non-negative least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (NN-LASSO)-based solver that estimates a sparse nonnegative angular representation via an accelerated proximal-gradient method followed by cluster-based AoA decoding, and (ii) a low-complexity successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm that iteratively identifies and removes dominant power-profile components through cosine-similarity matching. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Quantum-PROBE framework consistently outperforms representative RARE- and RF-based benchmarks across diverse system configurations, while offering a clear accuracy-complexity tradeoff between the NN-LASSO and SIC variants for practical quantum sensing deployments.
Abstract:Distributed Federated Learning (DFL) enables decentralized model training across large-scale systems without a central parameter server. However, DFL faces three critical challenges: privacy leakage from honest-but-curious neighbors, slow convergence due to the lack of central coordination, and vulnerability to Byzantine adversaries aiming to degrade model accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a novel DFL framework that integrates Byzantine robustness, privacy preservation, and convergence acceleration. Within this framework, each device trains a local model using a Bayesian approach and independently selects an optimal subset of neighbors for posterior exchange. We formulate this neighbor selection as an optimization problem to minimize the global loss function under security and privacy constraints. Solving this problem is challenging because devices only possess partial network information, and the complex coupling between topology, security, and convergence remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we first analytically characterize the trade-offs between dynamic connectivity, Byzantine detection, privacy levels, and convergence speed. Leveraging these insights, we develop a fully distributed Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm. This approach enables devices to make autonomous connection decisions based on local observations. Simulation results demonstrate that our method achieves superior robustness and efficiency with significantly lower overhead compared to traditional security and privacy schemes.