Robust Deep Learning-Based Physical Layer Communications: Strategies and Approaches

Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a transformative technology with immense potential to reshape the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication network. By utilizing advanced algorithms for feature extraction and pattern recognition, DL provides unprecedented capabilities in optimizing the network efficiency and performance, particularly in physical layer communications. Although DL technologies present the great potential, they also face significant challenges related to the robustness, which are expected to intensify in the complex and demanding 6G environment. Specifically, current DL models typically exhibit substantial performance degradation in dynamic environments with time-varying channels, interference of noise and different scenarios, which affect their effectiveness in diverse real-world applications. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of strategies and approaches for robust DL-based methods in physical layer communications. First we introduce the key challenges that current DL models face. Then we delve into a detailed examination of DL approaches specifically tailored to enhance robustness in 6G, which are classified into data-driven and model-driven strategies. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of these methods by case studies and outline future research directions.

Wireless Large AI Model: Shaping the AI-Native Future of 6G and Beyond

The emergence of sixth-generation and beyond communication systems is expected to fundamentally transform digital experiences through introducing unparalleled levels of intelligence, efficiency, and connectivity. A promising technology poised to enable this revolutionary vision is the wireless large AI model (WLAM), characterized by its exceptional capabilities in data processing, inference, and decision-making. In light of these remarkable capabilities, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of WLAM, elucidating its fundamental principles, diverse applications, critical challenges, and future research opportunities. We begin by introducing the background of WLAM and analyzing the key synergies with wireless networks, emphasizing the mutual benefits. Subsequently, we explore the foundational characteristics of WLAM, delving into their unique relevance in wireless environments. Then, the role of WLAM in optimizing wireless communication systems across various use cases and the reciprocal benefits are systematically investigated. Furthermore, we discuss the integration of WLAM with emerging technologies, highlighting their potential to enable transformative capabilities and breakthroughs in wireless communication. Finally, we thoroughly examine the high-level challenges hindering the practical implementation of WLAM and discuss pivotal future research directions.

AccidentSim: Generating Physically Realistic Vehicle Collision Videos from Real-World Accident Reports

Collecting real-world vehicle accident videos for autonomous driving research is challenging due to their rarity and complexity. While existing driving video generation methods may produce visually realistic videos, they often fail to deliver physically realistic simulations because they lack the capability to generate accurate post-collision trajectories. In this paper, we introduce AccidentSim, a novel framework that generates physically realistic vehicle collision videos by extracting and utilizing the physical clues and contextual information available in real-world vehicle accident reports. Specifically, AccidentSim leverages a reliable physical simulator to replicate post-collision vehicle trajectories from the physical and contextual information in the accident reports and to build a vehicle collision trajectory dataset. This dataset is then used to fine-tune a language model, enabling it to respond to user prompts and predict physically consistent post-collision trajectories across various driving scenarios based on user descriptions. Finally, we employ Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to render high-quality backgrounds, merging them with the foreground vehicles that exhibit physically realistic trajectories to generate vehicle collision videos. Experimental results demonstrate that the videos produced by AccidentSim excel in both visual and physical authenticity.

EvAnimate: Event-conditioned Image-to-Video Generation for Human Animation

Conditional human animation transforms a static reference image into a dynamic sequence by applying motion cues such as poses. These motion cues are typically derived from video data but are susceptible to limitations including low temporal resolution, motion blur, overexposure, and inaccuracies under low-light conditions. In contrast, event cameras provide data streams with exceptionally high temporal resolution, a wide dynamic range, and inherent resistance to motion blur and exposure issues. In this work, we propose EvAnimate, a framework that leverages event streams as motion cues to animate static human images. Our approach employs a specialized event representation that transforms asynchronous event streams into 3-channel slices with controllable slicing rates and appropriate slice density, ensuring compatibility with diffusion models. Subsequently, a dual-branch architecture generates high-quality videos by harnessing the inherent motion dynamics of the event streams, thereby enhancing both video quality and temporal consistency. Specialized data augmentation strategies further enhance cross-person generalization. Finally, we establish a new benchmarking, including simulated event data for training and validation, and a real-world event dataset capturing human actions under normal and extreme scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate that EvAnimate achieves high temporal fidelity and robust performance in scenarios where traditional video-derived cues fall short.

LLM-EvRep: Learning an LLM-Compatible Event Representation Using a Self-Supervised Framework

Recent advancements in event-based recognition have demonstrated significant promise, yet most existing approaches rely on extensive training, limiting their adaptability for efficient processing of event-driven visual content. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable zero-shot capabilities across diverse domains, but their application to event-based visual recognition remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{LLM-EvGen}, an event representation generator that produces LLM-compatible event representations \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, thereby enhancing the performance of LLMs on event recognition tasks. The generator is trained using a self-supervised framework, aligning the generated representations with semantic consistency and structural fidelity. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on three datasets: N-ImageNet, N-Caltech101, and N-MNIST. The results demonstrate that our method, \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, outperforms the event-to-video method, E2VID, by 15.93\%, 0.82\%, and 50.21\%, respectively, in recognition tasks when evaluated using GPT-4o.

Terahertz Integrated Sensing and Communication-Empowered UAVs in 6G: A Transceiver Design Perspective

Due to their high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a pivotal role in not only communication, but also sensing. Especially by exploiting the ultra-wide bandwidth of terahertz (THz) bands, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC)-empowered UAV has been a promising technology of 6G space-air-ground integrated networks. In this article, we systematically investigate the key techniques and essential obstacles for THz-ISAC-empowered UAV from a transceiver design perspective, with the highlight of its major challenges and key technologies. Specifically, we discuss the THz-ISAC-UAV wireless propagation environment, based on which several channel characteristics for communication and sensing are revealed. We point out the transceiver payload design peculiarities for THz-ISAC-UAV from the perspective of antenna design, radio frequency front-end, and baseband signal processing. To deal with the specificities faced by the payload, we shed light on three key technologies, i.e., hybrid beamforming for ultra-massive MIMO-ISAC, power-efficient THz-ISAC waveform design, as well as communication and sensing channel state information acquisition, and extensively elaborate their concepts and key issues. More importantly, future research directions and associated open problems are presented, which may unleash the full potential of THz-ISAC-UAV for 6G wireless networks.

NVS-SQA: Exploring Self-Supervised Quality Representation Learning for Neurally Synthesized Scenes without References

Neural View Synthesis (NVS), such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting, effectively creates photorealistic scenes from sparse viewpoints, typically evaluated by quality assessment methods like PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. However, these full-reference methods, which compare synthesized views to reference views, may not fully capture the perceptual quality of neurally synthesized scenes (NSS), particularly due to the limited availability of dense reference views. Furthermore, the challenges in acquiring human perceptual labels hinder the creation of extensive labeled datasets, risking model overfitting and reduced generalizability. To address these issues, we propose NVS-SQA, a NSS quality assessment method to learn no-reference quality representations through self-supervision without reliance on human labels. Traditional self-supervised learning predominantly relies on the "same instance, similar representation" assumption and extensive datasets. However, given that these conditions do not apply in NSS quality assessment, we employ heuristic cues and quality scores as learning objectives, along with a specialized contrastive pair preparation process to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning. The results show that NVS-SQA outperforms 17 no-reference methods by a large margin (i.e., on average 109.5% in SRCC, 98.6% in PLCC, and 91.5% in KRCC over the second best) and even exceeds 16 full-reference methods across all evaluation metrics (i.e., 22.9% in SRCC, 19.1% in PLCC, and 18.6% in KRCC over the second best).

Semantics-Guided Diffusion for Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding in Wireless Image Transmission

Joint source-channel coding (JSCC) offers a promising avenue for enhancing transmission efficiency by jointly incorporating source and channel statistics into the system design. A key advancement in this area is the deep joint source and channel coding (DeepJSCC) technique that designs a direct mapping of input signals to channel symbols parameterized by a neural network, which can be trained for arbitrary channel models and semantic quality metrics. This paper advances the DeepJSCC framework toward a semantics-aligned, high-fidelity transmission approach, called semantics-guided diffusion DeepJSCC (SGD-JSCC). Existing schemes that integrate diffusion models (DMs) with JSCC face challenges in transforming random generation into accurate reconstruction and adapting to varying channel conditions. SGD-JSCC incorporates two key innovations: (1) utilizing some inherent information that contributes to the semantics of an image, such as text description or edge map, to guide the diffusion denoising process; and (2) enabling seamless adaptability to varying channel conditions with the help of a semantics-guided DM for channel denoising. The DM is guided by diverse semantic information and integrates seamlessly with DeepJSCC. In a slow fading channel, SGD-JSCC dynamically adapts to the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) directly estimated from the channel output, thereby eliminating the need for additional pilot transmissions for channel estimation. In a fast fading channel, we introduce a training-free denoising strategy, allowing SGD-JSCC to effectively adjust to fluctuations in channel gains. Numerical results demonstrate that, guided by semantic information and leveraging the powerful DM, our method outperforms existing DeepJSCC schemes, delivering satisfactory reconstruction performance even at extremely poor channel conditions.

NeRF-NQA: No-Reference Quality Assessment for Scenes Generated by NeRF and Neural View Synthesis Methods

Neural View Synthesis (NVS) has demonstrated efficacy in generating high-fidelity dense viewpoint videos using a image set with sparse views. However, existing quality assessment methods like PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS are not tailored for the scenes with dense viewpoints synthesized by NVS and NeRF variants, thus, they often fall short in capturing the perceptual quality, including spatial and angular aspects of NVS-synthesized scenes. Furthermore, the lack of dense ground truth views makes the full reference quality assessment on NVS-synthesized scenes challenging. For instance, datasets such as LLFF provide only sparse images, insufficient for complete full-reference assessments. To address the issues above, we propose NeRF-NQA, the first no-reference quality assessment method for densely-observed scenes synthesized from the NVS and NeRF variants. NeRF-NQA employs a joint quality assessment strategy, integrating both viewwise and pointwise approaches, to evaluate the quality of NVS-generated scenes. The viewwise approach assesses the spatial quality of each individual synthesized view and the overall inter-views consistency, while the pointwise approach focuses on the angular qualities of scene surface points and their compound inter-point quality. Extensive evaluations are conducted to compare NeRF-NQA with 23 mainstream visual quality assessment methods (from fields of image, video, and light-field assessment). The results demonstrate NeRF-NQA outperforms the existing assessment methods significantly and it shows substantial superiority on assessing NVS-synthesized scenes without references. An implementation of this paper are available at https://github.com/VincentQQu/NeRF-NQA.

Light Field Image Quality Assessment With Auxiliary Learning Based on Depthwise and Anglewise Separable Convolutions

In multimedia broadcasting, no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is used to indicate the user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) and to support intelligent data transmission while optimizing user experience. This paper proposes an improved no-reference light field image quality assessment (NR-LFIQA) metric for future immersive media broadcasting services. First, we extend the concept of depthwise separable convolution (DSC) to the spatial domain of light field image (LFI) and introduce "light field depthwise separable convolution (LF-DSC)", which can extract the LFI's spatial features efficiently. Second, we further theoretically extend the LF-DSC to the angular space of LFI and introduce the novel concept of "light field anglewise separable convolution (LF-ASC)", which is capable of extracting both the spatial and angular features for comprehensive quality assessment with low complexity. Third, we define the spatial and angular feature estimations as auxiliary tasks in aiding the primary NR-LFIQA task by providing spatial and angular quality features as hints. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first exploration of deep auxiliary learning with spatial-angular hints on NR-LFIQA. Experiments were conducted in mainstream LFI datasets such as Win5-LID and SMART with comparisons to the mainstream full reference IQA metrics as well as the state-of-the-art NR-LFIQA methods. The experimental results show that the proposed metric yields overall 42.86% and 45.95% smaller prediction errors than the second-best benchmarking metric in Win5-LID and SMART, respectively. In some challenging cases with particular distortion types, the proposed metric can reduce the errors significantly by more than 60%.