TWIST: Closed-Loop token Synchronization for Application-Aware Wireless Digital Twins

Wireless digital twins require repeated synchronization between a time-evolving physical scene and its digital counterpart under limited and time-varying communication resources. For perception-centric twins, pixel-domain transmission or uniformly protected bitstreams can be mismatched to the semantic state consumed by twin-side applications. This paper proposes TWIST, a closed-loop token synchronization framework for application-aware wireless digital twins. TWIST represents each physical observation as a token and synchronizes this state over a wireless link, rather than optimizing visual reconstruction. Token positions are grouped by task relevance and protected through mode-conditioned unequal error protection under low-, medium-, and high-synchronization modes. At the twin side, decoding confidence converts unreliable hard token decisions into erasures, which are restored by a completion model before updating the semantic twin state. The recovered state supports traffic-state inference and generates compact feedback statistics, including channel quality, receiver uncertainty, semantic drift, and application priority, for subsequent mode adaptation. Experiments on a dynamic road-scene digital-twin scenario show that TWIST improves traffic-state inference and semantic twin-state synchronization compared with fixed-mode and channel-only adaptation strategies, while reducing the average synchronization cost relative to always-high transmission.

TONIC: Token-Centric Semantic Communication for Task-Oriented Wireless Systems

Tokens are becoming the basic units through which foundation models represent and process information for understanding and inference. However, traditional wireless communication, centered on bit-level fidelity, faces a mismatch between what is transmitted reliably and what downstream models actually consume. This mismatch calls for a communication design that directly accounts for token-level task relevance and downstream model requirements, rather than treating all transmitted bits as equally important. In this paper, we propose TONIC, a token-centric semantic communication framework for task-oriented wireless systems. The transmitter converts each source sample into a sequence of tokens, estimates token-level task relevance, and allocates protection through utility-aware unequal error protection under a fixed channel-use budget. At the receiver, token-level confidence is used to gate unreliable decisions, turning harmful substitutions into recoverable erasures before a Transformer-based completion model restores the masked tokens for final task inference. Our framework combines transmitter-side semantic-aware protection with receiver-side confidence-aware gating in a modular and interpretable architecture, rather than relying solely on fully black-box end-to-end learning. We further establish a utility-aware Bayes-risk interpretation for the receiver-side gating rule and study its interaction with unequal protection and completion. Experimental results on image classification show that TONIC consistently outperforms separation-based schemes, the pixel-domain DeepJSCC baseline, and token-domain baselines under matched communication budgets over AWGN, Rayleigh, and Rician channels.

Large-Scale AI in Telecom: Charting the Roadmap for Innovation, Scalability, and Enhanced Digital Experiences

This white paper discusses the role of large-scale AI in the telecommunications industry, with a specific focus on the potential of generative AI to revolutionize network functions and user experiences, especially in the context of 6G systems. It highlights the development and deployment of Large Telecom Models (LTMs), which are tailored AI models designed to address the complex challenges faced by modern telecom networks. The paper covers a wide range of topics, from the architecture and deployment strategies of LTMs to their applications in network management, resource allocation, and optimization. It also explores the regulatory, ethical, and standardization considerations for LTMs, offering insights into their future integration into telecom infrastructure. The goal is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for the adoption of LTMs to enhance scalability, performance, and user-centric innovation in telecom networks.