XL-ChannelDiff: An Efficient Diffusion-Based Multi-Domain Near-Field Channel Extrapolation Framework for XL-MIMO Systems

Accurate channel state information (CSI) acquisition is essential for unleashing the performance gains of extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems. However, in near-field regions, CSI acquisition is much more challenging than in the far field due to the high-dimensional channel representation and spherical wavefront propagation. To address this, in this paper, we propose an efficient multi-domain near-field channel extrapolation framework for XL-MIMO systems. Leveraging the conditional denoising diffusion implicit model (CDDIM), our approach enables accurate channel extrapolation across the antenna, frequency, and spatial domains. Specifically, we design a physics-aware CDDIM backbone that incorporates position-embedded patch tokenization and a mask-guided multi-head attention mechanism, enabling the model to exploit position-dependent channel correlations induced by near-field spherical-wave propagation. To ensure high-fidelity extrapolation, we incorporate a Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) discriminator that provides adversarial supervision to the CDDIM during both the training and reverse sampling phases. Additionally, a RePaint-style refinement scheme is introduced to optimize the sampling trajectory, further boosting extrapolation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework, achieving superior extrapolation accuracy and robust generalization across diverse domains, varied configurations, and severe masking conditions.

Vision-Based Efficient Joint Trajectory and Channel Tracking in Near-Field XL-MIMO Systems

Accurate joint tracking of mobile users, surrounding scatterers, and dynamic channels is a critical task for sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems, essential for both ensuring high-quality communications and empowering advanced selsing applications such as autonomous driving and immersive extended reality. While extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) inherently offers strong support for this task through its high spatial resolution and spectral efficiency, its massive scale of antenna arrays, coupled with near-field propagation characteristics, makes joint trajectory and channel tracking time-consuming and hardware-intensive. To address these challenges, we rethink the problem from a vision-based signal perspective. Specifically, we design a subarray-based partially connected hybrid beamforming (PC-HBF) architecture with a tailored time-multiplexed (TM) mechanism. This effectively compensates for the aperture loss caused by limited radio frequency (RF) chains, generating high-fidelity Cartesian-domain signal images that inherently capture near-field spatial features. Based on this visual representation, we propose an improved CenterNet to perform accurate one-shot path localization, circumventing the path-iterative search required by conventional compressed-sensing-based methods. Building upon this to further improve the accuracy and exploit temporal correlation, a local small-scale orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) refiner and a lightweight cascaded OMP tracker are developed. Finally, a Hungarian-based trajectory association module is incorporated to maintain track continuity and provide trajectory-level information for environment monitoring. Simulation results show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms representative baselines in position and channel tracking accuracy, especially under low-SNR and limited-hardware conditions.

Digital Twin-Based Channel Generation Toolchain and Foundation Model for Low-Altitude XL-MIMO

The rapid development of the low-altitude economy (LAE) has created growing demand for reliable aerial communication systems. Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is a promising enabler for such systems due to its high spatial resolution and robust connectivity. However, three-dimensional (3D) mobility together with near-field propagation makes it difficult to obtain dedicated high-fidelity wireless datasets, hindering systematic algorithm development and evaluation. To address this issue, we develop LAETwin-XL, a digital twin (DT)-based toolchain and dataset for XL-MIMO research in LAE scenarios. Built on the Sionna ray-tracing (RT) module, the proposed toolchain simulates near-field and far-field channels with diverse wireless labels for practical environments. Building on this dataset, we further develop a conditional denoising diffusion implicit model (CDDIM)-based generative foundation model that is pretrained to learn transferable XL-MIMO channel representations from incomplete channel observations. Unlike conventional task-specific or foundation models that rely on relatively complete channel inputs, the proposed model can generatively infer informative channel representations from partially observed channels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves effective zero-shot channel extrapolation performance. Furthermore, using lightweight task heads and limited training data, it enables parameter-efficient transfer to various downstream tasks (e.g., channel estimation, classification, and localization), delivering high accuracy and robustness even under sparse antenna observations. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/Lmyxxn/LAETwin-XL.

UMI-Bench 1.0: An Open and Reproducible Real-World Benchmark for Tabletop Robotic Manipulation with UMI Data

Real-robot evaluation is essential for understanding whether learned manipulation policies can operate reliably outside curated demonstrations. This need is particularly pressing for Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI)-style policies, whose performance depends on the coupling between wrist-view observations, action representation, data collection, and physical deployment. Existing real-world benchmarks have made important progress, but they are not designed around this UMI data-to-deployment setting. We present UMI-Bench 1.0, a local-first real-robot benchmark for standardized evaluation of UMI-style manipulation policies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark dedicated to real-world evaluation of UMI-based manipulation models. UMI-Bench aligns data collection, scene reset, policy execution, result logging, and task-factor analysis within a unified protocol. By making the full evaluation process reproducible and auditable, UMI-Bench provides a practical testbed for measuring how UMI-trained policies generalize to real physical manipulation.

Foundation Models for Wireless Communications: From PHY Intelligence to Network Autonomy

6G networks will introduce unprecedented complexity, which calls for a paradigm shift in network optimization and management. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions, especially those enabled by the recently developed foundation models, have been recognized as promising candidates. Foundation models are large-scale AI models with general-purpose feature extraction capabilities, and once trained on massive amounts of data, they can be adapted to solve a wide range of downstream tasks, either in a zero-shot manner or with few-shot fine-tuning. This article provides a comprehensive overview of how foundation models are reshaping physical-layer processing and wireless resource management across three progressive paradigms. First, we examine the adaptation of off-the-shelf pre-trained foundation models to various wireless tasks. Second, we explore wireless-native foundation models, built from scratch on wireless data to bridge cross-domain modality gaps and capture universal wireless-domain physical characteristics. Third, we highlight agentic foundation models, which elevate static data processing into autonomous, reasoning-driven network orchestration. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of applying foundation models to emerging 6G frontiers, including integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architectures, semantic communications, and system-level network autonomy. Finally, we identify critical open challenges and opportunities, charting a promising path toward fully intelligent and adaptive wireless networks.

SkySense: A Semi-Supervised Generative Framework for UAV Localization in ISAC Networks

Extreme data scarcity and inherent multipath spatial ambiguity severely limit existing deep learning-based channel state information (CSI) fingerprinting localization schemes for target unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To overcome these challenges, we propose an end-to-end semi-supervised generative localization framework. First, by exploiting the temporal correlations inherent in continuous flight trajectories, a self-supervised encoder extracts robust spatial features from massive unlabeled CSI sequences to establish structured latent representations. Following this, we utilize a consistency model, a powerful derivative of diffusion architectures, as the core generative backbone to map the learned latent space to physical coordinates, jointly fine-tuning the pre-trained encoder with a strictly limited set of labeled CSI. This consistency formulation models the conditional distribution to resolve the mean collapse problem of discriminative models, while compressing the inference trajectory to 1-2 steps to avoid the latency bottleneck of traditional diffusion models. Furthermore, a lightweight distributed fusion mechanism is designed to aggregate spatial predictions across multiple base stations (BS) from a multi-view geometry perspective. Comprehensive evaluations on a real-world measurement dataset demonstrate that our framework achieves low latency and suppresses the mean localization error to 9.77 cm under a 3-BS fusion setup with only a 1\% label fraction, significantly outperforming existing fully supervised and semi-supervised discriminative baselines.

Low-Overhead Receiver Design for Data-Dependent Superimposed Training via Deep Learning

Superimposed pilot (SIP) transmission improves spectral efficiency by eliminating the dedicated pilot overhead required in orthogonal pilot (OP)-based schemes. However, SIP suffers from severe pilot-data coupling, which leads to a critical performance-complexity bottleneck at the receiver. To address this issue, this paper proposes a low-overhead transmission framework that revitalizes data-dependent superimposed training (DDST) with enhanced interference mitigation strategies. First, for quasi-static block-fading channels, an enhanced DDST receiver is developed to achieve non-iterative pilot-data decoupling by exploiting data-dependent algebraic structures. Second, to overcome the sensitivity of conventional DDST to channel variations and symbol misidentification in fast time-varying environments, a mix transmission scheme is developed. By strategically applying DDST to a subset of resource elements, the proposed scheme combines the interference-free transmission property of OP with the zero-pilot-overhead advantage of SIP, thereby improving demapping reliability and interference suppression. Furthermore, under the proposed mix scheme, a Vision Transformer-based neural receiver is designed to capture the orthogonal structure between pilots and perturbation-bearing data, as well as the underlying channel correlations, thereby relaxing the stringent quasi-static assumption required for interference disentanglement. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves significant performance gains in the low-to-medium SNR regime under time-varying channels while providing superior computational efficiency compared with state-of-the-art SIP receivers.

NF-TrackLLM: Joint Prediction of UAV Trajectory and Near-Field Beam for LAE XL-MIMO Systems

User localization and beam management are tightly linked in extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems, especially in dense low-altitude economy (LAE) scenarios. However, the near-field propagation in XL-MIMO introduces strong distance sensitivity and complex spatial coupling, which makes joint trajectory and beam prediction challenging. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have attracted attention in physical-layer transmission for modeling long-range dependencies. In this paper, we propose NF-TrackLLM, a multi-modal semantic-aware framework for near-field unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) positioning and beam prediction in XL-MIMO systems. By incorporating visual and LiDAR sensing into a Sionna-based channel generation pipeline, environmental semantics and GPS are utilized to guide trajectory and beam prediction. Built upon the aligned multi-modal representation, a GPT-2-based spatiotemporal reasoning backbone, and a cascaded prediction strategy are employed, where future trajectories are first inferred and then used to guide beam prediction as geometric priors. Simulation results demonstrate that NF-TrackLLM achieves accurate beam prediction and reliable UAV trajectory tracking in dense urban low-altitude scenarios.

Propagation-Consistent Wireless Environment Digital Twin Construction Under Sparse Measurements

Digital twins (DTs) are promising for wireless deployment, optimization, and data generation, but building a propagation-faithful twin from sparse real measurements remains difficult. This paper proposes a wireless environment digital twin (WEDT) construction paradigm that evolves a reconstructed geometric DT into a propagation-consistent wireless environment representation through calibration of a scene-level electromagnetic (EM) property field. Instead of directly fitting link-specific channel responses, the proposed paradigm first constructs a geometry-prior Bayesian channel map (BCM) to convert sparse position-labeled channel state information (CSI) into dense probabilistic supervision with uncertainty estimates. It then embeds the learnable EM property field into differentiable ray tracing (RT) based channel computation, thereby enabling calibration through an explicit propagation chain. Experiments in both public and real-world scenes show that WEDT achieves accurate channel prediction, generalizes to unseen transceiver topologies, and remains effective across different sampling conditions. WEDT also offers utility for material-related environment sensing, more reliable physical-layer planning, and higher-quality synthetic data generation for wireless AI. These results demonstrate the value of the proposed paradigm for propagation-consistent WEDT construction and related wireless applications.

Distributed Near-Field Channel Estimation for U6G XL-MIMO Systems under Beam Squint

Since the beam squint and near-field effects both inherently exist in upper-6 GHz (U6G) extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems, wideband near-field channel estimation faces severe challenges, such as higher computational complexity, and higher pilot overhead particularly at hybrid architectures with fewer radio frequency (RF) chains. To precisely reduce the complexity and number of pilots, the parametric symmetry of wideband near-field channels is explored, such that the channel parameters, including angle, distance, and range, can be decoupled based on the delay variations observed by different antennas. Based on this, a distributed parametric symmetry-based (DPS) algorithm, applicable to U6G XL-MIMO, is proposed. The delays observed by different subarrays are estimated and extrapolated across the local processing units (LPUs) firstly, and then, the channel parameters are decoupled and estimated at the central processing unit (CPU), by only linearly combining the delays from different LPUs. The path gains are calculated at different LPUs, respectively, to reconstruct the channel with low complexity. Since the proposed algorithm does not rely on scanning the polar-domain dictionary, only a single pilot is required even with hybrid architectures. Furthermore, the computational complexity, multiple-path resolution, Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and lower bound (LB) of the estimates in hybrid architectures and the DPS algorithm, respectively, are analyzed, to evaluate the realizable potential of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results prove that the proposed algorithm has a higher estimation accuracy, while requiring less complexity and pilots.