Discrete-Space Generative AI Pipeline for Semantic Transmission of Signals

We introduce Discernment, a semantic communication system that transmits the meaning of physical signals (baseband radio and audio) over a technical channel using GenAI models operating in discrete spaces. Discernment dynamically adapts to channel impairments - modeled as erasure channels - by switching between an autoregressive or a diffusion-based generative algorithm, depending on the erasure pattern. Our results show that Discernment maintains semantic integrity even as channel capacity severely degrades, exhibiting very small and graceful performance decline in both classification accuracy and statistical fidelity of the reconstructed meaning. These findings demonstrate Discernment's ability to adjust to diverse physical channel conditions while maintaining spectral efficiency and low model complexity, making it well suited for IoT deployments and strongly motivating further research on this semantic channel paradigm.

A look at adversarial attacks on radio waveforms from discrete latent space

Having designed a VQVAE that maps digital radio waveforms into discrete latent space, and yields a perfectly classifiable reconstruction of the original data, we here analyze the attack suppressing properties of VQVAE when an adversarial attack is performed on high-SNR radio-frequency (RF) data-points. To target amplitude modulations from a subset of digitally modulated waveform classes, we first create adversarial attacks that preserve the phase between the in-phase and quadrature component whose values are adversarially changed. We compare them with adversarial attacks of the same intensity where phase is not preserved. We test the classification accuracy of such adversarial examples on a classifier trained to deliver 100% accuracy on the original data. To assess the ability of VQVAE to suppress the strength of the attack, we evaluate the classifier accuracy on the reconstructions by VQVAE of the adversarial datapoints and show that VQVAE substantially decreases the effectiveness of the attack. We also compare the I/Q plane diagram of the attacked data, their reconstructions and the original data. Finally, using multiple methods and metrics, we compare the probability distribution of the VQVAE latent space with and without attack. Varying the attack strength, we observe interesting properties of the discrete space, which may help detect the attacks.

ReFormer: Generating Radio Fakes for Data Augmentation

We present ReFormer, a generative AI (GAI) model that can efficiently generate synthetic radio-frequency (RF) data, or RF fakes, statistically similar to the data it was trained on, or with modified statistics, in order to augment datasets collected in real-world experiments. For applications like this, adaptability and scalability are important issues. This is why ReFormer leverages transformer-based autoregressive generation, trained on learned discrete representations of RF signals. By using prompts, such GAI can be made to generate the data which complies with specific constraints or conditions, particularly useful for training channel estimation and modeling. It may also leverage the data from a source system to generate training data for a target system. We show how different transformer architectures and other design choices affect the quality of generated RF fakes, evaluated using metrics such as precision and recall, classification accuracy and signal constellation diagrams.

Deep-Learned Compression for Radio-Frequency Signal Classification

Next-generation cellular concepts rely on the processing of large quantities of radio-frequency (RF) samples. This includes Radio Access Networks (RAN) connecting the cellular front-end based on software defined radios (SDRs) and a framework for the AI processing of spectrum-related data. The RF data collected by the dense RAN radio units and spectrum sensors may need to be jointly processed for intelligent decision making. Moving large amounts of data to AI agents may result in significant bandwidth and latency costs. We propose a deep learned compression (DLC) model, HQARF, based on learned vector quantization (VQ), to compress the complex-valued samples of RF signals comprised of 6 modulation classes. We are assessing the effects of HQARF on the performance of an AI model trained to infer the modulation class of the RF signal. Compression of narrow-band RF samples for the training and off-the-site inference will allow for an efficient use of the bandwidth and storage for non-real-time analytics, and for a decreased delay in real-time applications. While exploring the effectiveness of the HQARF signal reconstructions in modulation classification tasks, we highlight the DLC optimization space and some open problems related to the training of the VQ embedded in HQARF.