Evolving Intelligent Complex Systems via Intellicise Networks: Architecture, Technologies, and Pathways

Future engineering infrastructures are evolving into large-scale, open, heterogeneous, and wirelessly interconnected complex systems. These systems present significant challenges in optimizing network resource utilization, managing high-dimensional information spaces, and accommodating diverse business requirements. Intellicise networks, characterized by Intent-driven operation, semantic-native capability, and distributed intelligence, offer a promising paradigm for enabling such intelligent complex systems. We provide a systematic exploration of future intelligent complex systems from the perspective of intellicise networks. Specifically, we propose a cross-domain intelligent communication network architecture based on intellicise networks, grounded in information theory, systems theory, game theory, and cybernetics. The architecture comprises a cross-layer organizational framework, multi-functional planes, and novel information flows. The cross-layer framework defines the vertical evolution from perception and cognition to decision, while the control, user, data, computation, intelligence, and security planes deliver horizontal intellicise capabilities. Moreover, data, knowledge, model, and task flows interconnect the various layers and planes, forming a closed-loop process that derives simplicity from high-level intelligene while concurrently pursuing enhanced. Building on this architecture, we review key enabling technologies, tracing their evolution from semantic extraction to intent understanding, from heterogeneous resource integration to self-configuration and self-optimization, from generative artificial intelligence (AI) to agentic AI, and from embodied AI to symbodied AI. Additionally, we present a case study on intellicise networks for embodied agent communications and discuss representative applications and services for intelligent complex systems.

When Multi-Robot Systems Meet Agentic AI:Towards Embodied Collective Intelligence

Embodied AI is increasingly becoming agentic, shifting robots from perception--control pipelines towards closed-loop systems that can retrieve context, deliberate during execution, monitor feedback, and refine future behavior. In parallel, robotics research has also moved from single-robot autonomy towards multi-robot systems, driven by the need for wider sensing, distributed action, heterogeneous capabilities, and fault tolerance. As AI agents move from single-agent use towards multi-agent collaboration, robotics faces a parallel challenge: robot teams must move beyond sharing maps, task assignments, and datasets towards sharing the state produced by embodied agent loops. This article explores Embodied Collective Intelligence (ECI), a future multi-robot paradigm in which a robot team accumulates and uses world context, task progress, and skill experience as shared resources. Specifically, we first review how embodied AI is becoming agentic and how multi-robot cooperation has evolved. We then present Embodied Collective Intelligence through Co-Perception, Co-Action, and Co-Evolution. Finally, we use an illustrative navigation study to examine one concrete component of the concept: shared world-memory inheritance. The study shows that a newly added robot can benefit from merged team memory, but it is not intended as a full evaluation of the ECI framework. Taken together, the review and conceptual framework motivate Embodied Collective Intelligence as a direction for embodied multi-agent intelligence, while the case study grounds one measurable part of the concept.

When Retrieval Hurts Code Completion: A Diagnostic Study of Stale Repository Context

Context: Retrieval-augmented code generation relies on cross-file repository context, but retrieved snippets may come from obsolete project states. Objectives: We study whether temporally stale repository snippets act as harmless noise or actively induce current-state-incompatible code. Methods: We conduct a controlled diagnostic study on a curated 17-sample set of production-helper signature changes from five Python repositories. For each sample, we compare current-only, stale-only, no-retrieval, and mixed current/stale retrieval conditions under prompts that hide commit freshness and expected current signatures. Results: Under neutralized prompts, stale-only retrieval induces stale helper references on 15/17 Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct samples and 13/17 gpt-4.1-mini samples, corresponding to 88.2 and 76.5 percentage-point increases over current-only retrieval. No retrieval produces zero stale references but only 1/17 passing completions. The two models share 75.0% Jaccard overlap among stale-triggering samples, and mixed conditions show that adding valid current evidence largely rescues stale-only failures. Conclusion: Temporal validity of retrieved repository context is a distinct diagnostic variable for Code RAG robustness: stale context can actively bias models toward obsolete repository state rather than merely removing useful evidence.

When Eavesdroppers Reason: Agentic Eavesdropping Attacks on Semantic Communication

Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a promising paradigm for next-generation networks. However, its typical end-to-end joint source--channel coding (JSCC) architecture also raises serious privacy concerns. To guide future secure SemCom design, it is important to understand how serious such leakage can be. Nevertheless, existing eavesdropping attacks mainly rely on fixed-configuration solvers and often require instantaneous wiretap channel state information (CSI) to achieve effective privacy inference. This may lead future secure SemCom designs to overlook potentially severe risks. To address this, we propose a large language model (LLM)-orchestrated agentic eavesdropper. Specifically, the proposed eavesdropper forms a closed-loop workflow with three functional agents. The optimization agent adaptively performs joint semantic-and-channel inversion to recover private information from the intercepted signal without requiring wiretap CSI. The perception agent evaluates the effectiveness of the optimization agent and assesses whether the recovered private semantics are reasonable, providing feedback to the optimization agent. The refinement agent further analyzes the recovered content and uses a generative prior to refine promising candidates into more realistic and complete private reconstructions while preserving consistency with the intercepted signal. Simulation results over a MIMO Rayleigh fading channel show that the proposed eavesdropper achieves more than $75\%$ eavesdropping success rate at $\mathrm{SNR}\geq 5$~dB even without wiretap CSI, highlighting a severe privacy threat that future secure SemCom systems must address.

CoVSpec: Efficient Device-Edge Co-Inference for Vision-Language Models via Speculative Decoding

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in multimodal perception and reasoning. However, deploying large VLMs on mobile devices remains challenging due to their substantial computational and memory demands. A practical alternative is device-edge co-inference, where a lightweight draft VLM on the mobile device collaborates with a larger target VLM on the edge server via speculative decoding. Nevertheless, directly extending speculative decoding to VLMs suffers from severe inefficiency due to excessive visual-token computation and high communication overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoVSpec, an efficient collaborative speculative decoding framework for VLM inference. Specifically, we first develop a training-free visual token reduction framework that prunes redundant visual tokens on the mobile device by jointly considering query relevance, token activity, and low-rank dependency. Moreover, we design an adaptive drafting strategy that dynamically adjusts both the verification frequency and the draft length. In addition, we introduce a parallel branching mechanism with decoupled verification-correction to improve draft-side utilization during target-side verification and reduce correction-related transmission overhead. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CoVSpec achieves up to 2.21x higher throughput than target-only inference and reduces communication overhead by more than 96% compared with baselines, without compromising task accuracy.

Evolving Token Communication with Parametric Memory Network

Token communication has emerged as a promising framework for efficient wireless transmission by representing source data as compact semantic tokens. However, transmitting full semantic tokens still incurs considerable communication overhead. In this paper, we propose an evolving semantic token communication system with a parametric memory network over MIMO fading channels. Specifically, only an equal-length prefix of each semantic token is transmitted, which reduces transmission cost while preserving a consistent token structure for receiver-side recovery. At the receiver, a parametric memory network is introduced to reconstruct the missing suffix information from the received token prefixes, where semantic memory is stored implicitly in the network parameters. To realize this design, full semantic tokens are first organized into a codebook, and truncated tokens are paired with the codeword labels of their corresponding full tokens. Based on these token-label pairs, kNN-based teacher distributions are constructed to fine-tune a pretrained GPT-2-based recovery module, which learns to infer the codeword distribution of each incomplete token and recover the corresponding complete semantic token. In addition, an online evolution strategy is developed to periodically update the parametric memory network and the entire system using newly observed test samples, thereby improving adaptability under distribution shifts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the existing evolving memory benchmark under different channel conditions and channel bandwidth ratios, with up to 1.09 dB PSNR improvement.

IAT: Instance-As-Token Compression for Historical User Sequence Modeling in Industrial Recommender Systems

Although sophisticated sequence modeling paradigms have achieved remarkable success in recommender systems, the information capacity of hand-crafted sequential features constrains the performance upper bound. To better enhance user experience by encoding historical interaction patterns, this paper presents a novel two-stage sequence modeling framework termed Instance-As-Token (IAT). The first stage of IAT compresses all features of each historical interaction instance into a unified instance embedding, which encodes the interaction characteristics in a compact yet informative token. Both temporal-order and user-order compression schemes are proposed, with the latter better aligning with the demands of downstream sequence modeling. The second stage involves the downstream task fetching fixed-length compressed instance tokens via timestamps and adopting standard sequence modeling approaches to learn long-range preferences patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits superior in-domain and cross-domain transferability. IAT has been successfully deployed in real-world industrial recommender systems, including e-commerce advertising, shopping mall marketing, and live-streaming e-commerce, delivering substantial improvements in key business metrics.

Adaptive Semantic Communication for Wireless Image Transmission Leveraging Mixture-of-Experts Mechanism

Deep learning based semantic communication has achieved significant progress in wireless image transmission, but most existing schemes rely on fixed models and thus lack robustness to diverse image contents and dynamic channel conditions. To improve adaptability, recent studies have developed adaptive semantic communication strategies that adjust transmission or model behavior according to either source content or channel state. More recently, MoE-based semantic communication has emerged as a sparse and efficient adaptive architecture, although existing designs still mainly rely on single-driven routing. To address this limitation, we propose a novel multi-stage end-to-end image semantic communication system for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels, built upon an adaptive MoE Swin Transformer block. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic expert gating mechanism that jointly evaluates both real-time CSI and the semantic content of input image patches to compute adaptive routing probabilities. By selectively activating only a specialized subset of experts based on this joint condition, our approach breaks the rigid coupling of traditional adaptive methods and overcomes the bottlenecks of single-driven routing. Simulation results indicate a significant improvement in reconstruction quality over existing methods while maintaining the transmission efficiency.

Cache-enabled Generative Joint Source-Channel Coding for Evolving Semantic Communications

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.

Agentic Wireless Communication for 6G: Intent-Aware and Continuously Evolving Physical-Layer Intelligence

As 6G wireless systems evolve, growing functional complexity and diverse service demands are driving a shift from rule-based control to intent-driven autonomous intelligence. User requirements are no longer captured by a single metric (e.g., throughput or reliability), but by multi-dimensional objectives such as latency sensitivity, energy preference, computational constraints, and service-level requirements. These objectives may also change over time due to environmental dynamics and user-network interactions. Therefore, accurate understanding of both the communication environment and user intent is critical for autonomous and sustainably evolving 6G communications. Large language models (LLMs), with strong contextual understanding and cross-modal reasoning, provide a promising foundation for intent-aware network agents. Compared with rule-driven or centrally optimized designs, LLM-based agents can integrate heterogeneous information and translate natural-language intents into executable control and configuration decisions. Focusing on a closed-loop pipeline of intent perception, autonomous decision making, and network execution, this paper investigates agentic AI for the 6G physical layer and its realization pathways. We review representative physical-layer tasks and their limitations in supporting intent awareness and autonomy, identify application scenarios where agentic AI is advantageous, and discuss key challenges and enabling technologies in multimodal perception, cross-layer decision making, and sustainable optimization. Finally, we present a case study of an intent-driven link decision agent, termed AgenCom, which adaptively constructs communication links under diverse user preferences and channel conditions.