Yiwei Liao

Yong Xiao, Yiwei Liao, Yingyu Li et al.

Semantic-aware communication is a novel paradigm that draws inspiration from human communication focusing on the delivery of the meaning of messages. It has attracted significant interest recently due to its potential to improve the efficiency and reliability of communication and enhance users' QoE. Most existing works focus on transmitting and delivering the explicit semantic meaning that can be directly identified from the source signal. This paper investigates the implicit semantic-aware communication in which the hidden information that cannot be directly observed from the source signal must be recognized and interpreted by the intended users. To this end, a novel implicit semantic-aware communication (iSAC) architecture is proposed for representing, communicating, and interpreting the implicit semantic meaning between source and destination users. A projection-based semantic encoder is proposed to convert the high-dimensional graphical representation of explicit semantics into a low-dimensional semantic constellation space for efficient physical channel transmission. To enable the destination user to learn and imitate the implicit semantic reasoning process of source user, a generative adversarial imitation learning-based solution, called G-RML, is proposed. Different from existing communication solutions, the source user in G-RML does not focus only on sending as much of the useful messages as possible; but, instead, it tries to guide the destination user to learn a reasoning mechanism to map any observed explicit semantics to the corresponding implicit semantics that are most relevant to the semantic meaning. Compared to the existing solutions, our proposed G-RML requires much less communication and computational resources and scales well to the scenarios involving the communication of rich semantic meanings consisting of a large number of concepts and relations.

Eun Chang, Zhuangqun Huang, Yiwei Liao et al.

We introduce WearVQA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the Visual Question Answering (VQA) capabilities of multi-model AI assistant on wearable devices like smart glasses. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on high-quality, third-person imagery, WearVQA reflects the unique challenges of ego-centric interaction-where visual inputs may be occluded, poorly lit, unzoomed, or blurry, and questions are grounded in realistic wearable use cases. The benchmark comprises 2,520 carefully curated image-question-answer triplets, spanning 7 diverse image domains including both text-centric and general scenes, 10 cognitive task types ranging from basic recognition to various forms of reasoning, and 6 common wearables-specific image quality issues. All questions are designed to be answerable using only the visual input and common senses. WearVQA is paired with a rigorous LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework with 96% labeling accuracy. Open-source and proprietary multi-model LLMs achieved a QA accuracy as low as 24-52% on WearVQA, with substantial drops on lower-quality images and reasoning-heavy tasks. These observations position WearVQA as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for guiding technical advancement towards robust, real-world multi-model wearables AI systems.

Yujie Zhou, Yiwei Liao, Cheng Peng et al.

Semantic communication (SemCom) shifts the focus from data transmission to meaning delivery, enabling efficient and intelligent communication. Existing AI-based coding schemes for multi-modal multi-task SemCom often require transmitters with full-modal data to participate in all receivers' tasks, which leads to redundant transmissions and conflicts with the physical limits of channel capacity and computational capability. In this paper, we propose PoM$^2$-DIB, a novel framework that extends the distributed information bottleneck (DIB) theory to address this problem. Unlike the typical DIB, this framework introduces modality selection as an additional key design variable, enabling a more flexible tradeoff between communication rate and inference quality. This extension selects only the most relevant modalities for task participation, adhering to the physical constraints, while following efficient DIB-based coding. To optimize selection and coding end-to-end, we relax modality selection into a probabilistic form, allowing the use of score function estimation with common randomness to enable optimizable coordinated decisions across distributed devices. Experimental results on public datasets verify that PoM$^2$-DIB achieves high inference quality compared to full-participation baselines in various tasks under physical limits.