Hongyang Du

Hongyang Du, Jiazhen Liu, Dusit Niyato et al.

Metaverse encapsulates our expectations of the next-generation Internet, while bringing new key performance indicators (KPIs). Although conventional ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) can satisfy objective KPIs, it is difficult to provide a personalized immersive experience that is a distinctive feature of the Metaverse. Since the quality of experience (QoE) can be regarded as a comprehensive KPI, the URLLC is evolved towards the next generation URLLC (xURLLC) with a personalized resource allocation scheme to achieve higher QoE. To deploy Metaverse xURLLC services, we study the interaction between the Metaverse service provider (MSP) and the network infrastructure provider (InP), and provide an optimal contract design framework. Specifically, the utility of the MSP, defined as a function of Metaverse users' QoE, is to be maximized, while ensuring the incentives of the InP. To model the QoE mathematically, we propose a novel metric named Meta-Immersion that incorporates both the objective KPIs and subjective feelings of Metaverse users. Furthermore, we develop an attention-aware rendering capacity allocation scheme to improve QoE in xURLLC. Using a user-object-attention level dataset, we validate that the xURLLC can achieve an average of 20.1% QoE improvement compared to the conventional URLLC with a uniform resource allocation scheme. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/HongyangDu/AttentionQoE

Xumin Huang, Peichun Li, Hongyang Du et al.

Artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) has emerged as a promising technology to improve the efficiency, quality, diversity and flexibility of the content creation process by adopting a variety of generative AI models. Deploying AIGC services in wireless networks has been expected to enhance the user experience. However, the existing AIGC service provision suffers from several limitations, e.g., the centralized training in the pre-training, fine-tuning and inference processes, especially their implementations in wireless networks with privacy preservation. Federated learning (FL), as a collaborative learning framework where the model training is distributed to cooperative data owners without the need for data sharing, can be leveraged to simultaneously improve learning efficiency and achieve privacy protection for AIGC. To this end, we present FL-based techniques for empowering AIGC, and aim to enable users to generate diverse, personalized, and high-quality content. Furthermore, we conduct a case study of FL-aided AIGC fine-tuning by using the state-of-the-art AIGC model, i.e., stable diffusion model. Numerical results show that our scheme achieves advantages in effectively reducing the communication cost and training latency and privacy protection. Finally, we highlight several major research directions and open issues for the convergence of FL and AIGC.

Hongyang Du, Zonghang Li, Dusit Niyato et al.

Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) refers to the use of AI to automate the information creation process while fulfilling the personalized requirements of users. However, due to the instability of AIGC models, e.g., the stochastic nature of diffusion models, the quality and accuracy of the generated content can vary significantly. In wireless edge networks, the transmission of incorrectly generated content may unnecessarily consume network resources. Thus, a dynamic AIGC service provider (ASP) selection scheme is required to enable users to connect to the most suited ASP, improving the users' satisfaction and quality of generated content. In this article, we first review the AIGC techniques and their applications in wireless networks. We then present the AIGC-as-a-service (AaaS) concept and discuss the challenges in deploying AaaS at the edge networks. Yet, it is essential to have performance metrics to evaluate the accuracy of AIGC services. Thus, we introduce several image-based perceived quality evaluation metrics. Then, we propose a general and effective model to illustrate the relationship between computational resources and user-perceived quality evaluation metrics. To achieve efficient AaaS and maximize the quality of generated content in wireless edge networks, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-enabled algorithm for optimal ASP selection. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can provide a higher quality of generated content to users and achieve fewer crashed tasks by comparing with four benchmarks, i.e., overloading-avoidance, random, round-robin policies, and the upper-bound schemes.

Jinbo Wen, Jiangtian Nie, Jiawen Kang et al.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) possesses the capabilities of generating realistic data and facilitating advanced decision-making. By integrating GAI into modern Internet of Things (IoT), Generative Internet of Things (GIoT) is emerging and holds immense potential to revolutionize various aspects of society, enabling more efficient and intelligent IoT applications, such as smart surveillance and voice assistants. In this article, we present the concept of GIoT and conduct an exploration of its potential prospects. Specifically, we first overview four GAI techniques and investigate promising GIoT applications. Then, we elaborate on the main challenges in enabling GIoT and propose a general GAI-based secure incentive mechanism framework to address them, in which we adopt Generative Diffusion Models (GDMs) for incentive mechanism designs and apply blockchain technologies for secure GIoT management. Moreover, we conduct a case study on modern Internet of Vehicle traffic monitoring, which utilizes GDMs to generate effective contracts for incentivizing users to contribute sensing data with high quality. Finally, we suggest several open directions worth investigating for the future popularity of GIoT.

Haotian Zheng, Zhanwei Wang, Mingyao Cui et al.

Speculative inference (SPIN) was originally developed as an efficient architecture to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose its distributed deployment to enable cooperative token generation in a multiuser edge system; its advantage is to effectively balance computational loads between resource-constrained devices and servers. The resulting architecture, termed Multi-access SPIN (Multi-SPIN), utilizes on-device small language models to generate and upload candidate token drafts, while an edge server operates the LLM to verify them in parallel batches. Given the severe heterogeneity in users' computation and communication capabilities, the draft length emerges as a critical control variable that influences node-level computation loads and multi-access latency, thereby governing the sum token goodput. Consequently, considering frequency-division multiple access, we investigate the problem of multi-access draft control, a joint optimization of draft-length control and bandwidth allocation to maximize sum token goodput. We examine two cases: (1) homogeneous draft lengths across users to facilitate server-side batching, and (2) heterogeneous draft lengths to introduce a new dimension for goodput enhancement. By developing decomposition methods, we reduce these complex optimizations into tractable sub-problems, which allow efficient draft control algorithms to be derived in closed form. Our analysis shows that the optimal bandwidth allocation compensates users with weaker computation-and-communication capabilities in the homogeneous case due to the batching synchronization requirements, whereas its heterogeneous-case counterpart rewards users with higher acceptance rates by relaxing such requirements. Experiments using Llama-2 and Qwen3.5 model pairs across diverse tasks demonstrate that Multi-SPIN improves goodput by up to 88% over heterogeneity-agnostic baselines.

Yinqiu Liu, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato et al.

With the phenomenal success of diffusion models and ChatGPT, deep generation models (DGMs) have been experiencing explosive growth from 2022. Not limited to content generation, DGMs are also widely adopted in Internet of Things, Metaverse, and digital twin, due to their outstanding ability to represent complex patterns and generate plausible samples. In this article, we explore the applications of DGMs in a crucial task, i.e., improving the efficiency of wireless network management. Specifically, we firstly overview the generative AI, as well as three representative DGMs. Then, a DGM-empowered framework for wireless network management is proposed, in which we elaborate the issues of the conventional network management approaches, why DGMs can address them efficiently, and the step-by-step workflow for applying DGMs in managing wireless networks. Moreover, we conduct a case study on network economics, using the state-of-the-art DGM model, i.e., diffusion model, to generate effective contracts for incentivizing the mobile AI-Generated Content (AIGC) services. Last but not least, we discuss important open directions for the further research.

Hongyang Du, Guangyuan Liu, Dusit Niyato et al.

Semantic communication (SemCom) holds promise for reducing network resource consumption while achieving the communications goal. However, the computational overheads in jointly training semantic encoders and decoders-and the subsequent deployment in network devices-are overlooked. Recent advances in Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) offer a potential solution. The robust learning abilities of GAI models indicate that semantic decoders can reconstruct source messages using a limited amount of semantic information, e.g., prompts, without joint training with the semantic encoder. A notable challenge, however, is the instability introduced by GAI's diverse generation ability. This instability, evident in outputs like text-generated images, limits the direct application of GAI in scenarios demanding accurate message recovery, such as face image transmission. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a GAI-aided SemCom system with multi-model prompts for accurate content decoding. Moreover, in response to security concerns, we introduce the application of covert communications aided by a friendly jammer. The system jointly optimizes the diffusion step, jamming, and transmitting power with the aid of the generative diffusion models, enabling successful and secure transmission of the source messages.

Jiayuan Chen, Changyan Yi, Hongyang Du et al.

Mobile Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) technology refers to the adoption of AI algorithms deployed at mobile edge networks to automate the information creation process while fulfilling the requirements of end users. Mobile AIGC has recently attracted phenomenal attentions and can be a key enabling technology for an emerging application, called human digital twin (HDT). HDT empowered by the mobile AIGC is expected to revolutionize the personalized healthcare by generating rare disease data, modeling high-fidelity digital twin, building versatile testbeds, and providing 24/7 customized medical services. To promote the development of this new breed of paradigm, in this article, we propose a system architecture of mobile AIGC-driven HDT and highlight the corresponding design requirements and challenges. Moreover, we illustrate two use cases, i.e., mobile AIGC-driven HDT in customized surgery planning and personalized medication. In addition, we conduct an experimental study to prove the effectiveness of the proposed mobile AIGC-driven HDT solution, which shows a particular application in a virtual physical therapy teaching platform. Finally, we conclude this article by briefly discussing several open issues and future directions.

Guangyuan Liu, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato et al.

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) Services have significant potential in digital content creation. The distinctive abilities of AIGC, such as content generation based on minimal input, hold huge potential, especially when integrating with semantic communication (SemCom). In this paper, a novel comprehensive conceptual model for the integration of AIGC and SemCom is developed. Particularly, a content generation level is introduced on top of the semantic level that provides a clear outline of how AIGC and SemCom interact with each other to produce meaningful and effective content. Moreover, a novel framework that employs AIGC technology is proposed as an encoder and decoder for semantic information, considering the joint optimization of semantic extraction and evaluation metrics tailored to AIGC services. The framework can adapt to different types of content generated, the required quality, and the semantic information utilized. By employing a Deep Q Network (DQN), a case study is presented that provides useful insights into the feasibility of the optimization problem and its convergence characteristics.

Hongyang Du, Jiacheng Wang, Dusit Niyato et al.

Emerging with the support of computing and communications technologies, Metaverse is expected to bring users unprecedented service experiences. However, the increase in the number of Metaverse users places a heavy demand on network resources, especially for Metaverse services that are based on graphical extended reality and require rendering a plethora of virtual objects. To make efficient use of network resources and improve the Quality-of-Experience (QoE), we design an attention-aware network resource allocation scheme to achieve customized Metaverse services. The aim is to allocate more network resources to virtual objects in which users are more interested. We first discuss several key techniques related to Metaverse services, including QoE analysis, eye-tracking, and remote rendering. We then review existing datasets and propose the user-object-attention level (UOAL) dataset that contains the ground truth attention of 30 users to 96 objects in 1,000 images. A tutorial on how to use UOAL is presented. With the help of UOAL, we propose an attention-aware network resource allocation algorithm that has two steps, i.e., attention prediction and QoE maximization. Specially, we provide an overview of the designs of two types of attention prediction methods, i.e., interest-aware and time-aware prediction. By using the predicted user-object-attention values, network resources such as the rendering capacity of edge devices can be allocated optimally to maximize the QoE. Finally, we propose promising research directions related to Metaverse services.

Hongyang Du, Zongxia Li, Dawei Liu et al.

3D vision has rapidly evolved, driven by increasingly diverse data representations, learning paradigms, and modeling strategies. Yet the field remains fragmented across representations and benchmarks, making it difficult to develop unified perspectives on efficiency, fidelity, and scalability. This work provides a data-centric taxonomy of 3D vision that connects geometric representations, datasets, learning frameworks, and applications within a single conceptual map. We begin by analysing the principal structural representations of 3D data--point clouds, meshes, voxels, and 3D Gaussians--along with their acquisition pipelines. We then examine how dataset design, benchmark construction, and supervision regimes shape recent advances, spanning 2D-supervised 3D learning, implicit neural representations, and 4D world modeling. Through this integrative lens, we clarify the relationships among representations, learning paradigms, and downstream tasks in reconstruction, generation, and video modeling, offering a consolidated view of emerging trends toward balancing efficiency and fidelity and toward multimodal geometric grounding.

Jiacheng Wang, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato et al.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with a surge in training data, have led to the widespread use of AI for digital content generation, with ChatGPT serving as a representative example. Despite the increased efficiency and diversity, the inherent instability of AI models poses a persistent challenge in guiding these models to produce the desired content for users. In this paper, we introduce an integration of wireless perception (WP) with AI-generated content (AIGC) and propose a unified WP-AIGC framework to improve the quality of digital content production. The framework employs a novel multi-scale perception technology to read user's posture, which is difficult to describe accurately in words, and transmits it to the AIGC model as skeleton images. Based on these images and user's service requirements, the AIGC model generates corresponding digital content. Since the production process imposes the user's posture as a constraint on the AIGC model, it makes the generated content more aligned with the user's requirements. Additionally, WP-AIGC can also accept user's feedback, allowing adjustment of computing resources at edge server to improve service quality. Experiments results verify the effectiveness of the WP-AIGC framework, highlighting its potential as a novel approach for guiding AI models in the accurate generation of digital content.

Jiawen Kang, Jiayi He, Hongyang Du et al.

For vehicular metaverses, one of the ultimate user-centric goals is to optimize the immersive experience and Quality of Service (QoS) for users on board. Semantic Communication (SemCom) has been introduced as a revolutionary paradigm that significantly eases communication resource pressure for vehicular metaverse applications to achieve this goal. SemCom enables high-quality and ultra-efficient vehicular communication, even with explosively increasing data traffic among vehicles. In this article, we propose a hierarchical SemCom-enabled vehicular metaverses framework consisting of the global metaverse, local metaverses, SemCom module, and resource pool. The global and local metaverses are brand-new concepts from the metaverse's distribution standpoint. Considering the QoS of users, this article explores the potential security vulnerabilities of the proposed framework. To that purpose, this study highlights a specific security risk to the framework's SemCom module and offers a viable defense solution, so encouraging community researchers to focus more on vehicular metaverse security. Finally, we provide an overview of the open issues of secure SemCom in the vehicular metaverses, notably pointing out potential future research directions.

Yingkai Kang, Jinbo Wen, Jiawen Kang et al.

The vehicular metaverse is envisioned as a blended immersive domain that promises to bring revolutionary changes to the automotive industry. As a core component of vehicular metaverses, Vehicle Twins (VTs) are digital twins that cover the entire life cycle of vehicles, providing immersive virtual services for Vehicular Metaverse Users (VMUs). Vehicles with limited resources offload the computationally intensive tasks of constructing and updating VTs to edge servers and migrate VTs between these servers, ensuring seamless and immersive experiences for VMUs. However, the high mobility of vehicles, uneven deployment of edge servers, and potential security threats pose challenges to achieving efficient and reliable VT migrations. To address these issues, we propose a secure and reliable VT migration framework in vehicular metaverses. Specifically, we design a two-layer trust evaluation model to comprehensively evaluate the reputation value of edge servers in the network communication and interaction layers. Then, we model the VT migration problem as a partially observable Markov decision process and design a hybrid-Generative Diffusion Model (GDM) algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning to generate optimal migration decisions by taking hybrid actions (i.e., continuous actions and discrete actions). Numerical results demonstrate that the hybrid-GDM algorithm outperforms the baseline algorithms, showing strong adaptability in various settings and highlighting the potential of the hybrid-GDM algorithm for addressing various optimization issues in vehicular metaverses.

Jiayi He, Xiaofeng Luo, Jiawen Kang et al.

Semantic Communication (SemCom) plays a pivotal role in 6G networks, offering a viable solution for future efficient communication. Deep Learning (DL)-based semantic codecs further enhance this efficiency. However, the vulnerability of DL models to security threats, such as adversarial attacks, poses significant challenges for practical applications of SemCom systems. These vulnerabilities enable attackers to tamper with messages and eavesdrop on private information, especially in wireless communication scenarios. Although existing defenses attempt to address specific threats, they often fail to simultaneously handle multiple heterogeneous attacks. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based SemCom system. This system comprises a gating network and multiple experts, each specializing in different security challenges. The gating network adaptively selects suitable experts to counter heterogeneous attacks based on user-defined security requirements. Multiple experts collaborate to accomplish semantic communication tasks while meeting the security requirements of users. A case study in vehicular networks demonstrates the efficacy of the MoE-based SemCom system. Simulation results show that the proposed MoE-based SemCom system effectively mitigates concurrent heterogeneous attacks, with minimal impact on downstream task accuracy.

Zi Qin Liew, Hongyang Du, Wei Yang Bryan Lim et al.

Semantic communication technologies enable wireless edge devices to communicate effectively by transmitting semantic meaning of data. Edge components, such as vehicles in next-generation intelligent transport systems, use well-trained semantic models to encode and decode semantic information extracted from raw and sensor data. However, the limitation in computing resources makes it difficult to support the training process of accurate semantic models on edge devices. As such, edge devices can buy the pretrained semantic models from semantic model providers, which is called "semantic model trading". Upon collecting semantic information with the semantic models, the edge devices can then sell the extracted semantic information, e.g., information about urban road conditions or traffic signs, to the interested buyers for profit, which is called "semantic information trading". To facilitate both types of the trades, effective incentive mechanisms should be designed. Thus, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical trading system to support both semantic model trading and semantic information trading jointly. The proposed incentive mechanism helps to maximize the revenue of semantic model providers in the semantic model trading, and effectively incentivizes model providers to participate in the development of semantic communication systems. For semantic information trading, our designed auction approach can support the trading between multiple semantic information sellers and buyers, while ensuring individual rationality, incentive compatibility, and budget balance, and moreover, allowing them achieve higher utilities than the baseline method.

Guangyuan Liu, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato et al.

The popularity of Metaverse as an entertainment, social, and work platform has led to a great need for seamless avatar integration in the virtual world. In Metaverse, avatars must be updated and rendered to reflect users' behaviour. Achieving real-time synchronization between the virtual bilocation and the user is complex, placing high demands on the Metaverse Service Provider (MSP)'s rendering resource allocation scheme. To tackle this issue, we propose a semantic communication framework that leverages contest theory to model the interactions between users and MSPs and determine optimal resource allocation for each user. To reduce the consumption of network resources in wireless transmission, we use the semantic communication technique to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted. Under our simulation settings, the encoded semantic data only contains 51 bytes of skeleton coordinates instead of the image size of 8.243 megabytes. Moreover, we implement Deep Q-Network to optimize reward settings for maximum performance and efficient resource allocation. With the optimal reward setting, users are incentivized to select their respective suitable uploading frequency, reducing down-sampling loss due to rendering resource constraints by 66.076\% compared with the traditional average distribution method. The framework provides a novel solution to resource allocation for avatar association in VR environments, ensuring a smooth and immersive experience for all users.

Hanwen Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Wei Zhang et al.

With the advancements of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models, their capabilities are expanding significantly beyond content generation and the models are increasingly being used across diverse applications. Particularly, GenAI shows great potential in addressing challenges in the electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem ranging from charging management to cyber-attack prevention. In this paper, we specifically consider Internet of electric vehicles (IoEV) and we categorize GenAI for IoEV into four different layers namely, EV's battery layer, individual EV layer, smart grid layer, and security layer. We introduce various GenAI techniques used in each layer of IoEV applications. Subsequently, public datasets available for training the GenAI models are summarized. Finally, we provide recommendations for future directions. This survey not only categorizes the applications of GenAI in IoEV across different layers but also serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners by highlighting the design and implementation challenges within each layer. Furthermore, it provides a roadmap for future research directions, enabling the development of more robust and efficient IoEV systems through the integration of advanced GenAI techniques.

Wei Wei, Zheng Lin, Xihui Liu et al.

To enable training of large artificial intelligence (AI) models at the network edge, split federated learning (SFL) has emerged as a promising approach by distributing computation between edge devices and a server. However, while unstable network environments pose significant challenges to SFL, prior schemes often overlook such an effect by assuming perfect client participation, rendering them impractical for real-world scenarios. In this work, we develop an optimization framework for SFL with unstable client participation. We theoretically derive the first convergence upper bound for SFL with unstable client participation by considering activation uploading failures, gradient downloading failures, and model aggregation failures. Based on the theoretical results, we formulate a joint optimization problem for client sampling and model splitting to minimize the upper bound. We then develop an efficient solution approach to solve the problem optimally. Extensive simulations on EMNIST and CIFAR-10 demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework compared to existing benchmarks.

Jianzhe Xue, Yunting Xu, Dongcheng Yuan et al.

Traffic flow estimation (TFE) is crucial for intelligent transportation systems. Traditional TFE methods rely on extensive road sensor networks and typically incur significant costs. Sparse mobile crowdsensing enables a cost-effective alternative by utilizing sparsely distributed probe vehicle data (PVD) provided by connected vehicles. However, as pointed out by the central limit theorem, the sparsification of PVD leads to the degradation of TFE accuracy. In response, this paper introduces a novel and cost-effective TFE framework that leverages sparse PVD and improves accuracy by applying the spatial-temporal generative artificial intelligence (GAI) framework. Within this framework, the conditional encoder mines spatial-temporal correlations in the initial TFE results derived from averaging vehicle speeds of each region, and the generative decoder generates high-quality and accurate TFE outputs. Additionally, the design of the spatial-temporal neural network is discussed, which is the backbone of the conditional encoder for effectively capturing spatial-temporal correlations. The effectiveness of the proposed TFE approach is demonstrated through evaluations based on real-world connected vehicle data. The experimental results affirm the feasibility of our sparse PVD-based TFE framework and highlight the significant role of the spatial-temporal GAI framework in enhancing the accuracy of TFE.

Jie Zheng, Ruichen Zhang, Dusit Niyato et al.

Enhancing future wireless networks presents a significant challenge for networking systems due to diverse user demands and the emergence of 6G technology. While reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework, it often encounters difficulties with high-dimensional state spaces and complex environments, leading to substantial computational demands, distributed intelligence, and potentially inconsistent outcomes. Large language models (LLMs), with their extensive pretrained knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities, offer promising tools to enhance RL in optimizing 6G wireless networks. We explore RL models augmented by LLMs, emphasizing their roles and the potential benefits of their synergy in wireless network optimization. We then examine LLM-enabled RL across various protocol layers: physical, data link, network, transport, and application layers. Additionally, we propose an LLM-assisted state representation and semantic extraction to enhance the multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. This approach is applied to service migration and request routing, as well as topology graph generation in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite networks. Through case studies, we demonstrate that our framework effectively performs optimization of wireless network. Finally, we outline prospective research directions for LLM-enabled RL in wireless network optimization.

Changyuan Zhao, Jiacheng Wang, Ruichen Zhang et al.

Deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) has emerged as a promising paradigm for semantic communication, delivering significant performance gains over conventional separate coding schemes. However, existing JSCC frameworks remain vulnerable to physical-layer adversarial threats, such as pilot spoofing and subcarrier jamming, compromising semantic fidelity. In this paper, we propose SecDiff, a plug-and-play, diffusion-aided decoding framework that significantly enhances the security and robustness of deep JSCC under adversarial wireless environments. Different from prior diffusion-guided JSCC methods that suffer from high inference latency, SecDiff employs pseudoinverse-guided sampling and adaptive guidance weighting, enabling flexible step-size control and efficient semantic reconstruction. To counter jamming attacks, we introduce a power-based subcarrier masking strategy and recast recovery as a masked inpainting problem, solved via diffusion guidance. For pilot spoofing, we formulate channel estimation as a blind inverse problem and develop an expectation-minimization (EM)-driven reconstruction algorithm, guided jointly by reconstruction loss and a channel operator. Notably, our method alternates between pilot recovery and channel estimation, enabling joint refinement of both variables throughout the diffusion process. Extensive experiments over orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) channels under adversarial conditions show that SecDiff outperforms existing secure and generative JSCC baselines by achieving a favorable trade-off between reconstruction quality and computational cost. This balance makes SecDiff a promising step toward practical, low-latency, and attack-resilient semantic communications.

Zongxia Li, Hongyang Du, Chengsong Huang et al.

Self-evolving has emerged as a key paradigm for improving foundational models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) with minimal human intervention. While recent approaches have demonstrated that LLM agents can self-evolve from scratch with little to no data, VLMs introduce an additional visual modality that typically requires at least some seed data, such as images, to bootstrap the self-evolution process. In this work, we present Multi-model Multimodal Zero (MM-Zero), the first RL-based framework to achieve zero-data self-evolution for VLM reasoning. Moving beyond prior dual-role (Proposer and Solver) setups, MM-Zero introduces a multi-role self-evolving training framework comprising three specialized roles: a Proposer that generates abstract visual concepts and formulates questions; a Coder that translates these concepts into executable code (e.g., Python, SVG) to render visual images; and a Solver that performs multimodal reasoning over the generated visual content. All three roles are initialized from the same base model and trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), with carefully designed reward mechanisms that integrate execution feedback, visual verification, and difficulty balancing. Our experiments show that MM-Zero improves VLM reasoning performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. MM-Zero establishes a scalable path toward self-evolving multi-model systems for multimodal models, extending the frontier of self-improvement beyond the conventional two-model paradigm.

Hongyang Du, Junjie Ye, Xiaoyan Cong et al.

While recent video diffusion models (VDMs) produce visually impressive results, they fundamentally struggle to maintain 3D structural consistency, often resulting in object deformation or spatial drift. We hypothesize that these failures arise because standard denoising objectives lack explicit incentives for geometric coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoGPA (Video Geometric Preference Alignment), a data-efficient self-supervised framework that leverages a geometry foundation model to automatically derive dense preference signals that guide VDMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This approach effectively steers the generative distribution toward inherent 3D consistency without requiring human annotations. VideoGPA significantly enhances temporal stability, physical plausibility, and motion coherence using minimal preference pairs, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in extensive experiments.

Zongxia Li, Xiyang Wu, Hongyang Du et al.

Multimodal Vision Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a transformative topic at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, enabling machines to perceive and reason about the world through both visual and textual modalities. For example, models such as CLIP, Claude, and GPT-4V demonstrate strong reasoning and understanding abilities on visual and textual data and beat classical single modality vision models on zero-shot classification [93]. With their rapid advancements in research and growing popularity in various applications, we provide a comprehensive survey of VLMs. Specifically, we provide a systematic overview of VLMs in the following aspects: [1] model information of the major VLMs developed up to 2025; [2] the transition of VLM architectures and the newest VLM alignment methods; [3] summary and categorization of the popular benchmarks and evaluation metrics of VLMs; [4] the challenges and issues faced by current VLMs such as hallucination, alignment, fairness, and safety. Detailed collections including papers and model repository links are listed in https://github.com/zli12321/Vision-Language-Models-Overview.

Zongxia Li, Xiyang Wu, Guangyao Shi et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong results in video understanding, yet a key question remains: do they truly comprehend visual content or only learn shallow correlations between vision and language? Real visual understanding, especially of physics and common sense, is essential for AI systems that interact with the physical world. Current evaluations mostly use real-world videos similar to training data, so high benchmark scores may not reflect real reasoning ability. To address this, we propose negative-control tests using videos that depict physically impossible or logically inconsistent events. We introduce VideoHallu, a synthetic dataset of physics- and commonsense-violating scenes generated with Veo2, Sora, and Kling. It includes expert-annotated question-answer pairs across four categories of violations. Tests of leading VLMs (Qwen-2.5-VL, Video-R1, VideoChat-R1) show that, despite strong results on benchmarks such as MVBench and MMVU, they often miss these violations, exposing gaps in visual reasoning. Reinforcement learning fine-tuning on VideoHallu improves recognition of such violations without reducing standard benchmark performance. Our data is available at https://github.com/zli12321/VideoHallu.git.

Songhan Zhao, Shimin Gong, Bo Gu et al.

In this paper, we investigate a generative artificial intelligence (GAI)-assisted semantic communication framework for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based image transmissions. Semantic users (SUs) extract cross-modal semantic features from the raw images, which are then used for image recovery by leveraging a GAI model. The GAI enhances the generalization and recovery of semantic image transmissions, while NOMA efficiently allocates transmission capacities to SUs based on their traffic demands. Thus, the semantic extraction and transmission control jointly affect both semantic recovery performance and transmission overhead. We maximize a weighted performance of transmission latency and semantic recovery accuracy by jointly optimizing the semantic feature selection at the semantic level, as well as the receive beamforming and NOMA decoding order at the transmission level. To reduce potential redundancy in semantic features and improve optimization efficiency, we develop an importance-aware and model-driven proximal policy optimization (IM-PPO) framework. Specifically, we quantify and retain high-importance semantic features to enhance the learning efficiency of PPO, while model-based optimization methods are used to adapt the transmission control variables. Numerical results validate that the joint adjustment of the semantic feature selection and the transmission control significantly improves the semantic recovery accuracy and the transmission latency performance. Moreover, the IM-PPO framework effectively leverages the model information to improve the learning efficiency compared to benchmark methods.

Haidong Wang, Songhan Zhao, Bo Gu et al.

In this paper, we explore a joint source and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted channel encoding (JSRE) framework for multi-user semantic communications, where a deep neural network (DNN) extracts semantic features for all users and the RIS provides channel orthogonality, enabling a unified semantic encoding-decoding design. We aim to maximize the overall energy efficiency of semantic communications across all users by jointly optimizing the user scheduling, the RIS's phase shifts, and the semantic compression ratio. Although this joint optimization problem can be addressed using conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods, evaluating semantic similarity typically relies on extensive real environment interactions, which can incur heavy computational overhead during training. To address this challenge, we propose a truncated DRL (T-DRL) framework, where a DNN-based semantic similarity estimator is developed to rapidly estimate the similarity score. Moreover, the user scheduling strategy is tightly coupled with the semantic model configuration. To exploit this relationship, we further propose a semantic model caching mechanism that stores and reuses fine-tuned semantic models corresponding to different scheduling decisions. A Transformer-based actor network is employed within the DRL framework to dynamically generate action space conditioned on the current caching state. This avoids redundant retraining and further accelerates the convergence of the learning process. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed JSRE framework significantly improves the system energy efficiency compared with the baseline methods. By training fewer semantic models, the proposed T-DRL framework significantly enhances the learning efficiency.

Shiyuan Zhang, Jiale Du, Yuanwei Liu et al.

Base station (BS) deployment and operation are fundamental to network performance, yet they require accurate demand understanding, which remains difficult for operators. Cellular traffic in dense urban regions is well measured but highly dynamic, which undermines prediction-based management, whereas the scarcity of traffic measurements in emerging regions limits informed deployment decisions. Existing approaches therefore either depend on manual planning heuristics or use autoregressive predictors that fail to capture stochastic traffic variation. We present NetSpatial, a unified system for cellular planning and operation through spatially conditional traffic generation. NetSpatial exploits multimodal urban context, including satellite imagery and point of interest (POI) distributions, to learn how physical environment and functional semantics shape BS demand. It uses a multi-level flow-matching architecture that separates periodic structure from residual dynamics, enabling direct generation of long-horizon traffic sequences. NetSpatial supports two complementary decision scenarios, i.e., what-if analysis for deployment planning, which ranks candidate sites using generated traffic profiles, and what-to-do support for network operation, which uses generated traffic forecasts to guide BS sleep scheduling and load balancing. Experiments on real-world cellular traffic data show that NetSpatial reduces Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) by 29.44% over the strongest baseline, generalizes across cities in zero-shot experiments, and enables up to 16.8% energy savings while maintaining over 80% quality of experience.

Shiyuan Zhang, Tong Li, Zhu Xiao et al.

Service-level mobile traffic prediction for individual users is essential for network efficiency and quality of service enhancement. However, current prediction methods are limited in their adaptability across different urban environments and produce inaccurate results due to the high uncertainty in personal traffic patterns, the lack of detailed environmental context, and the complex dependencies among different network services. These challenges demand advanced modeling techniques that can capture dynamic traffic distributions and rich environmental features. Inspired by the recent success of diffusion models in distribution modeling and Large Language Models (LLMs) in contextual understanding, we propose an LLM-Enhanced Spatio-temporal Diffusion Model (LSDM). LSDM integrates the generative power of diffusion models with the adaptive learning capabilities of transformers, augmented by the ability to capture multimodal environmental information for modeling service-level patterns and dynamics. Extensive evaluations on real-world service-level datasets demonstrate that the model excels in traffic usage predictions, showing outstanding generalization and adaptability. After incorporating contextual information via LLM, the performance improves by at least 2.83% in terms of the coefficient of determination. Compared to models of a similar type, such as CSDI, the root mean squared error can be reduced by at least 8.29%. The code and dataset will be available at: https://github.com/SoftYuaneR/LSDM.

Matthew Gwilliam, Roy Zhang, Namitha Padmanabhan et al.

Implicit neural representation (INR) methods for video compression have recently achieved visual quality and compression ratios that are competitive with traditional pipelines. However, due to the need for per-sample network training, the encoding speeds of these methods are too slow for practical adoption. We develop a library to allow us to disentangle and review the components of methods from the NeRV family, reframing their performance in terms of not only size-quality trade-offs, but also impacts on training time. We uncover principles for effective video INR design and propose a state-of-the-art configuration of these components, Rabbit NeRV (RNeRV). When all methods are given equal training time (equivalent to 300 NeRV epochs) for 7 different UVG videos at 1080p, RNeRV achieves +1.27% PSNR on average compared to the best-performing alternative for each video in our NeRV library. We then tackle the encoding speed issue head-on by investigating the viability of hyper-networks, which predict INR weights from video inputs, to disentangle training from encoding to allow for real-time encoding. We propose masking the weights of the predicted INR during training to allow for variable, higher quality compression, resulting in 1.7% improvements to both PSNR and MS-SSIM at 0.037 bpp on the UCF-101 dataset, and we increase hyper-network parameters by 0.4% for 2.5%/2.7% improvements to PSNR/MS-SSIM with equal bpp and similar speeds. Our project website is available at https://mgwillia.github.io/vinrb/ and our code is available at https://github.com/mgwillia/vinrb.

Weiqiang Jin, Hongyang Du, Guizhong Liu et al.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved strong performance in cooperative adversarial tasks. However, most existing methods typically train agents against fixed opponent strategies and rely on such meta-static difficulty conditions, which limits their adaptability to changing environments and often leads to suboptimal policies. Inspired by the success of curriculum learning (CL) in supervised tasks, we propose a dynamic CL framework for MARL that employs an self-adaptive difficulty adjustment mechanism. This mechanism continuously modulates opponent strength based on real-time agent training performance, allowing agents to progressively learn from easier to more challenging scenarios. However, the dynamic nature of CL introduces instability due to nonstationary environments and sparse global rewards. To address this challenge, we develop a Counterfactual Group Relative Policy Advantage (CGRPA), which is tightly coupled with the curriculum by providing intrinsic credit signals that reflect each agent's impact under evolving task demands. CGRPA constructs a counterfactual advantage function that isolates individual contributions within group behavior, facilitating more reliable policy updates throughout the curriculum. CGRPA evaluates each agent's contribution through constructing counterfactual action advantage function, providing intrinsic rewards that enhance credit assignment and stabilize learning under non-stationary conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves both training stability and final performance, achieving competitive results against state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/NICE-HKU/CL2MARL-SMAC.

Ruichen Zhang, Hongyang Du, Yinqiu Liu et al.

In response to the needs of 6G global communications, satellite communication networks have emerged as a key solution. However, the large-scale development of satellite communication networks is constrained by the complex system models, whose modeling is challenging for massive users. Moreover, transmission interference between satellites and users seriously affects communication performance. To solve these problems, this paper develops generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents for model formulation and then applies a mixture of experts (MoE) approach to design transmission strategies. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to build an interactive modeling paradigm and utilize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to extract satellite expert knowledge that supports mathematical modeling. Afterward, by integrating the expertise of multiple specialized components, we propose an MoE-proximal policy optimization (PPO) approach to solve the formulated problem. Each expert can optimize the optimization variables at which it excels through specialized training through its own network and then aggregates them through the gating network to perform joint optimization. The simulation results validate the accuracy and effectiveness of employing a generative agent for problem formulation. Furthermore, the superiority of the proposed MoE-ppo approach over other benchmarks is confirmed in solving the formulated problem. The adaptability of MoE-PPO to various customized modeling problems has also been demonstrated.

Nguyen Van Huynh, Jiacheng Wang, Hongyang Du et al.

The recent evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) leads to the emergence of groundbreaking applications such as ChatGPT, which not only enhances the efficiency of digital content production, such as text, audio, video, or even network traffic data, but also enriches its diversity. Beyond digital content creation, GAI's capability in analyzing complex data distributions offers great potential for wireless communications, particularly amidst a rapid expansion of new physical layer communication technologies. For example, the diffusion model can learn input signal distributions and use them to improve the channel estimation accuracy, while the variational autoencoder can model channel distribution and infer latent variables for blind channel equalization. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive investigation of GAI's applications for communications at the physical layer, ranging from traditional issues, including signal classification, channel estimation, and equalization, to emerging topics, such as intelligent reflecting surfaces and joint source channel coding. We also compare GAI-enabled physical layer communications with those supported by traditional AI, highlighting GAI's inherent capabilities and unique contributions in these areas. Finally, the paper discusses open issues and proposes several future research directions, laying a foundation for further exploration and advancement of GAI in physical layer communications.

Jiayuan Chen, You Shi, Changyan Yi et al.

The Internet of things (IoT) can significantly enhance the quality of human life, specifically in healthcare, attracting extensive attentions to IoT-healthcare services. Meanwhile, the human digital twin (HDT) is proposed as an innovative paradigm that can comprehensively characterize the replication of the individual human body in the digital world and reflect its physical status in real time. Naturally, HDT is envisioned to empower IoT-healthcare beyond the application of healthcare monitoring by acting as a versatile and vivid human digital testbed, simulating the outcomes and guiding the practical treatments. However, successfully establishing HDT requires high-fidelity virtual modeling and strong information interactions but possibly with scarce, biased and noisy data. Fortunately, a recent popular technology called generative artificial intelligence (GAI) may be a promising solution because it can leverage advanced AI algorithms to automatically create, manipulate, and modify valuable while diverse data. This survey particularly focuses on the implementation of GAI-driven HDT in IoT-healthcare. We start by introducing the background of IoT-healthcare and the potential of GAI-driven HDT. Then, we delve into the fundamental techniques and present the overall framework of GAI-driven HDT. After that, we explore the realization of GAI-driven HDT in detail, including GAI-enabled data acquisition, communication, data management, digital modeling, and data analysis. Besides, we discuss typical IoT-healthcare applications that can be revolutionized by GAI-driven HDT, namely personalized health monitoring and diagnosis, personalized prescription, and personalized rehabilitation. Finally, we conclude this survey by highlighting some future research directions.

Guangyuan Liu, Nguyen Van Huynh, Hongyang Du et al.

With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, unmanned vehicle swarms have received great attention from both academia and industry due to their potential to provide services that are difficult and dangerous to perform by humans. However, learning and coordinating movements and actions for a large number of unmanned vehicles in complex and dynamic environments introduce significant challenges to conventional AI methods. Generative AI (GAI), with its capabilities in complex data feature extraction, transformation, and enhancement, offers great potential in solving these challenges of unmanned vehicle swarms. For that, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on applications, challenges, and opportunities of GAI in unmanned vehicle swarms. Specifically, we first present an overview of unmanned vehicles and unmanned vehicle swarms as well as their use cases and existing issues. Then, an in-depth background of various GAI techniques together with their capabilities in enhancing unmanned vehicle swarms are provided. After that, we present a comprehensive review on the applications and challenges of GAI in unmanned vehicle swarms with various insights and discussions. Finally, we highlight open issues of GAI in unmanned vehicle swarms and discuss potential research directions.

Cong T. Nguyen, Yinqiu Liu, Hongyang Du et al.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has recently emerged as a promising solution to address critical challenges of blockchain technology, including scalability, security, privacy, and interoperability. In this paper, we first introduce GAI techniques, outline their applications, and discuss existing solutions for integrating GAI into blockchains. Then, we discuss emerging solutions that demonstrate the effectiveness of GAI in addressing various challenges of blockchain, such as detecting unknown blockchain attacks and smart contract vulnerabilities, designing key secret sharing schemes, and enhancing privacy. Moreover, we present a case study to demonstrate that GAI, specifically the generative diffusion model, can be employed to optimize blockchain network performance metrics. Experimental results clearly show that, compared to a baseline traditional AI approach, the proposed generative diffusion model approach can converge faster, achieve higher rewards, and significantly improve the throughput and latency of the blockchain network. Additionally, we highlight future research directions for GAI in blockchain applications, including personalized GAI-enabled blockchains, GAI-blockchain synergy, and privacy and security considerations within blockchain ecosystems.

Dawei Li, Zongxia Li, Hongyang Du et al.

Skill usage has become a core component of modern agent systems and can substantially improve agents' ability to complete complex tasks. In real-world settings, where agents must monitor and interact with numerous personal applications, web browsers, and other environment interfaces, skill libraries can scale to thousands of reusable skills. Scaling to larger skill sets introduces two key challenges. First, loading the full skill set saturates the context window, driving up token costs, hallucination, and latency. In this paper, we present Graph of Skills (GoS), an inference-time structural retrieval layer for large skill libraries. GoS constructs an executable skill graph offline from skill packages, then at inference time retrieves a bounded, dependency-aware skill bundle through hybrid semantic-lexical seeding, reverse-weighted Personalized PageRank, and context-budgeted hydration. On SkillsBench and ALFWorld, GoS improves average reward by 43.6% over the vanilla full skill-loading baseline while reducing input tokens by 37.8%, and generalizes across three model families: Claude Sonnet, GPT-5.2 Codex, and MiniMax. Additional ablation studies across skill libraries ranging from 200 to 2,000 skills further demonstrate that GoS consistently outperforms both vanilla skills loading and simple vector retrieval in balancing reward, token efficiency, and runtime.

Bingkun Lai, Jinbo Wen, Jiawen Kang et al.

As the next-generation wireless communication system, Sixth-Generation (6G) technologies are emerging, enabling various mobile edge networks that can revolutionize wireless communication and connectivity. By integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) with mobile edge networks, generative mobile edge networks possess immense potential to enhance the intelligence and efficiency of wireless communication networks. In this article, we propose the concept of generative mobile edge networks and overview widely adopted GAI technologies and their applications in mobile edge networks. We then discuss the potential challenges faced by generative mobile edge networks in resource-constrained scenarios. To address these challenges, we develop a universal resource-efficient generative incentive mechanism framework, in which we design resource-efficient methods for network overhead reduction, formulate appropriate incentive mechanisms for the resource allocation problem, and utilize Generative Diffusion Models (GDMs) to find the optimal incentive mechanism solutions. Furthermore, we conduct a case study on resource-constrained mobile edge networks, employing model partition for efficient AI task offloading and proposing a GDM-based Stackelberg model to motivate edge devices to contribute computing resources for mobile edge intelligence. Finally, we propose several open directions that could contribute to the future popularity of generative mobile edge networks.

Xingkun Yin, Hongyang Du

Most existing memory-enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) approaches implicitly assume that memory validity can be established either through external evaluators that provide task-specific success signals or through internal model cognition, such as reflection, for editing memory entries. However, these assumptions often break down in practical environments with dynamic drifts. We propose the Global Verifier (GLOVE), a framework that introduces a new design dimension for LLM memory systems by establishing a relative notion of truth. Through active probing to detect inconsistencies between retrieved memories and fresh observations, GLOVE enables memory-environment realignment by verifying and updating memory without access to ground-truth supervision or strong reliance on model introspection. We evaluate GLOVE on diverse benchmarks spanning web navigation, planning, and control, augmented with controlled environmental drifts that introduce non-stationarity beyond the original benchmark settings. Our results show that GLOVE substantially improves agent success rates, suggesting a robust pathway to cognitive agents capable of self-evolving.

Jinbo Wen, Ruichen Zhang, Dusit Niyato et al.

By integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) has revolutionized many fields. However, AIoT is facing the challenges of energy consumption and carbon emissions due to the continuous advancement of mobile technology. Fortunately, Generative AI (GAI) holds immense potential to reduce carbon emissions of AIoT due to its excellent reasoning and generation capabilities. In this article, we explore the potential of GAI for carbon emissions reduction and propose a novel GAI-enabled solution for low-carbon AIoT. Specifically, we first study the main impacts that cause carbon emissions in AIoT, and then introduce GAI techniques and their relations to carbon emissions. We then explore the application prospects of GAI in low-carbon AIoT, focusing on how GAI can reduce carbon emissions of network components. Subsequently, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled carbon emission optimization framework, in which we design pluggable LLM and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) modules to generate more accurate and reliable optimization problems. Furthermore, we utilize Generative Diffusion Models (GDMs) to identify optimal strategies for carbon emission reduction. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Finally, we insightfully provide open research directions for low-carbon AIoT.

Weiqiang Jin, Hongyang Du, Biao Zhao et al.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, intelligent decision-making techniques have gradually surpassed human levels in various human-machine competitions, especially in complex multi-agent cooperative task scenarios. Multi-agent cooperative decision-making involves multiple agents working together to complete established tasks and achieve specific objectives. These techniques are widely applicable in real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving, drone navigation, disaster rescue, and simulated military confrontations. This paper begins with a comprehensive survey of the leading simulation environments and platforms used for multi-agent cooperative decision-making. Specifically, we provide an in-depth analysis for these simulation environments from various perspectives, including task formats, reward allocation, and the underlying technologies employed. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive overview of the mainstream intelligent decision-making approaches, algorithms and models for multi-agent systems (MAS). Theseapproaches can be broadly categorized into five types: rule-based (primarily fuzzy logic), game theory-based, evolutionary algorithms-based, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based, and large language models(LLMs)reasoning-based. Given the significant advantages of MARL andLLMs-baseddecision-making methods over the traditional rule, game theory, and evolutionary algorithms, this paper focuses on these multi-agent methods utilizing MARL and LLMs-based techniques. We provide an in-depth discussion of these approaches, highlighting their methodology taxonomies, advantages, and drawbacks. Further, several prominent research directions in the future and potential challenges of multi-agent cooperative decision-making are also detailed.

Adnan Shahid, Adrian Kliks, Ahmed Al-Tahmeesschi et al.

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.

Yijing Lin, Zhipeng Gao, Hongyang Du et al.

Federated unlearning has emerged as a promising paradigm to erase the client-level data effect without affecting the performance of collaborative learning models. However, the federated unlearning process often introduces extensive storage overhead and consumes substantial computational resources, thus hindering its implementation in practice. To address this issue, this paper proposes a scalable federated unlearning framework based on isolated sharding and coded computing. We first divide distributed clients into multiple isolated shards across stages to reduce the number of clients being affected. Then, to reduce the storage overhead of the central server, we develop a coded computing mechanism by compressing the model parameters across different shards. In addition, we provide the theoretical analysis of time efficiency and storage effectiveness for the isolated and coded sharding. Finally, extensive experiments on two typical learning tasks, i.e., classification and generation, demonstrate that our proposed framework can achieve better performance than three state-of-the-art frameworks in terms of accuracy, retraining time, storage overhead, and F1 scores for resisting membership inference attacks.

Yijing Lin, Zhipeng Gao, Hongyang Du et al.

Federated unlearning is a promising paradigm for protecting the data ownership of distributed clients. It allows central servers to remove historical data effects within the machine learning model as well as address the "right to be forgotten" issue in federated learning. However, existing works require central servers to retain the historical model parameters from distributed clients, such that allows the central server to utilize these parameters for further training even, after the clients exit the training process. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new blockchain-enabled trustworthy federated unlearning framework. We first design a proof of federated unlearning protocol, which utilizes the Chameleon hash function to verify data removal and eliminate the data contributions stored in other clients' models. Then, an adaptive contribution-based retraining mechanism is developed to reduce the computational overhead and significantly improve the training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve a better data removal effect than the state-of-the-art frameworks, marking a significant stride towards trustworthy federated unlearning.

Hao Zhang, Fuhui Zhou, Hongyang Du et al.

Wireless signal recognition (WSR) is a crucial technique for intelligent communications and spectrum sharing in the next six-generation (6G) wireless communication networks. It can be utilized to enhance network performance and efficiency, improve quality of service (QoS), and improve network security and reliability. Additionally, WSR can be applied for military applications such as signal interception, signal race, and signal abduction. In the past decades, great efforts have been made for the research of WSR. Earlier works mainly focus on model-based methods, including likelihood-based (LB) and feature-based (FB) methods, which have taken the leading position for many years. With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent methods including machine learning-based (ML-based) and deep learning-based (DL-based) methods have been developed to extract the features of the received signals and perform the classification. In this work, we provide a comprehensive review of WSR from the view of applications, main tasks, recent advances, datasets and evaluation metrics, challenges, and future directions. Specifically, intelligent WSR methods are introduced from the perspective of model, data, learning and implementation. Moreover, we analyze the challenges for WSR from the view of complex, dynamic, and open 6G wireless environments and discuss the future directions for WSR. This survey is expected to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art WSR techniques and inspire new research directions for WSR in 6G networks.

Zhonghao Lyu, Yulan Gao, Junting Chen et al.

Low-altitude economy (LAE) represents an emerging economic paradigm that redefines commercial and social aerial activities. Large artificial intelligence models (LAIMs) offer transformative potential to further enhance the intelligence of LAE services. However, deploying LAIMs in LAE poses several challenges, including the significant gap between their computational/storage demands and the limited onboard resources of LAE entities, the mismatch between lab-trained LAIMs and dynamic physical environments, and the inefficiencies of traditional decoupled designs for sensing, communication, and computation. To address these issues, we first propose a hierarchical system architecture tailored for LAIM deployment and present representative LAE application scenarios. Next, we explore key enabling techniques that facilitate the mutual co-evolution of LAIMs and low-altitude systems, and introduce a task-oriented execution pipeline for scalable and adaptive service delivery. Then, the proposed framework is validated through real-world case studies. Finally, we outline open challenges to inspire future research.

Xudong Wang, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato et al.

In wireless networks, applying deep learning models to solve matching problems between different entities has become a mainstream and effective approach. However, the complex network topology in 6G multiple access presents significant challenges for the real-time performance and stability of matching generation. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has demonstrated strong capabilities in graph feature extraction, exploration, and generation, offering potential for graph-structured matching generation. In this paper, we propose a GenAI-enabled matching generation framework to support 6G multiple access. Specifically, we first summarize the classical matching theory, discuss common GenAI models and applications from the perspective of matching generation. Then, we propose a framework based on generative diffusion models (GDMs) that iteratively denoises toward reward maximization to generate a matching strategy that meets specific requirements. Experimental results show that, compared to decision-based AI approaches, our framework can generate more effective matching strategies based on given conditions and predefined rewards, helping to solve complex problems in 6G multiple access, such as task allocation.

Zhe Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Hongyang Du et al.

Next-generation Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) is expected to be intelligent and scalable. In this paper, we study Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled next-generation MIMO networks. Firstly, we provide an overview of the development, fundamentals, and challenges of the next-generation MIMO. Then, we propose the concept of the generative AI agent, which is capable of generating tailored and specialized contents with the aid of LLM and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Next, we comprehensively discuss the features and advantages of the generative AI agent framework. More importantly, to tackle existing challenges of next-generation MIMO, we discuss generative AI agent-enabled next-generation MIMO networks from the perspective of performance analysis, signal processing, and resource allocation. Furthermore, we present two compelling case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging the generative AI agent for performance analysis in complex configuration scenarios. These examples highlight how the integration of generative AI agents can significantly enhance the analysis and design of next-generation MIMO systems. Finally, we discuss important potential research future directions.

Jinke Ren, Yaping Sun, Hongyang Du et al.

This paper delves into the applications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in semantic communication (SemCom) and presents a thorough study. Three popular SemCom systems enabled by classical GAI models are first introduced, including variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and diffusion models. For each system, the fundamental concept of the GAI model, the corresponding SemCom architecture, and the associated literature review of recent efforts are elucidated. Then, a novel generative SemCom system is proposed by incorporating the cutting-edge GAI technology-large language models (LLMs). This system features two LLM-based AI agents at both the transmitter and receiver, serving as "brains" to enable powerful information understanding and content regeneration capabilities, respectively. This innovative design allows the receiver to directly generate the desired content, instead of recovering the bit stream, based on the coded semantic information conveyed by the transmitter. Therefore, it shifts the communication mindset from "information recovery" to "information regeneration" and thus ushers in a new era of generative SemCom. A case study on point-to-point video retrieval is presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed generative SemCom system, showcasing a 99.98% reduction in communication overhead and a 53% improvement in retrieval accuracy compared to the traditional communication system. Furthermore, four typical application scenarios for generative SemCom are delineated, followed by a discussion of three open issues warranting future investigation. In a nutshell, this paper provides a holistic set of guidelines for applying GAI in SemCom, paving the way for the efficient implementation of generative SemCom in future wireless networks.