Mike Nilsson

Jingxuan Men, Mahdi Boloursaz Mashhadi, Ning Wang et al.

Token Communication (TokenCom) is a new paradigm, motivated by the recent success of Large AI Models (LAMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), where tokens serve as unified units of communication and computation, enabling efficient semantic- and goal-oriented information exchange in future wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Video TokenCom framework for textual intent-guided multi-rate video communication with Unequal Error Protection (UEP)-based source-channel coding adaptation. The proposed framework integrates user-intended textual descriptions with discrete video tokenization and unequal error protection to enhance semantic fidelity under restrictive bandwidth constraints. First, discrete video tokens are extracted through a pretrained video tokenizer, while text-conditioned vision-language modeling and optical-flow propagation are jointly used to identify tokens that correspond to user-intended semantics across space and time. Next, we introduce a semantic-aware multi-rate bit-allocation strategy, in which tokens highly related to the user intent are encoded using full codebook precision, whereas non-intended tokens are represented through reduced codebook precision differential encoding, enabling rate savings while preserving semantic quality. Finally, a source and channel coding adaptation scheme is developed to adapt bit allocation and channel coding to varying resources and link conditions. Experiments on various video datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms both conventional and semantic communication baselines, in perceptual and semantic quality on a wide SNR range.

Ho Man Kwan, Tianhao Peng, Ge Gao et al.

Recent works have demonstrated the viability of utilizing over-fitted implicit neural representations (INRs) as alternatives to autoencoder-based models for neural video compression. Among these INR-based video codecs, Neural Video Representation Compression (NVRC) was the first to adopt a fully end-to-end compression framework that compresses INRs, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, some recently proposed lightweight INRs have shown comparable performance to their baseline codecs with computational complexity lower than 10kMACs/pixel. In this work, we extend NVRC toward lightweight representations, and propose NVRC-Lite, which incorporates two key changes. Firstly, we integrated multi-scale feature grids into our lightweight neural representation, and the use of higher resolution grids significantly improves the performance of INRs at low complexity. Secondly, we address the issue that existing INRs typically leverage autoregressive models for entropy coding: these are effective but impractical due to their slow coding speed. In this work, we propose an octree-based context model for entropy coding high-dimensional feature grids, which accelerates the entropy coding module of the model. Our experimental results demonstrate that NVRC-Lite outperforms C3, one of the best lightweight INR-based video codecs, with up to 21.03% and 23.06% BD-rate savings when measured in PSNR and MS-SSIM, respectively, while achieving 8.4x encoding and 2.5x decoding speedup. The implementation of NVRC-Lite will be made available.