Semantic Communication with an LLM-enabled Knowledge Base

Abstract

Semantic communication (SC) can achieve superior coding and transmission performance based on the knowledge contained in the semantic knowledge base (KB). However, conventional KBs consist of source KBs and channel KBs, which are often costly to obtain data and limited in data scale. Fortunately, large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged with extensive knowledge and generative capabilities. Therefore, this paper proposes an SC system with LLM-enabled knowledge base (SC-LMKB), which utilizes the generation ability of LLMs to significantly enrich the KB of SC systems. In particular, we first design an LLM-enabled generation mechanism with a prompt engineering strategy for source data generation (SDG) and a cross-attention alignment method for channel data generation (CDG). However, hallucinations from LLMs may cause semantic noise, thus degrading SC performance. To mitigate the hallucination issue, a cross-domain fusion codec (CDFC) framework with a hallucination filtering phase and a cross-domain fusion phase is then proposed for SDG. In particular, the first phase filters out new data generated by the LMKB irrelevant to the original data based on semantic similarity. Then, a cross-domain fusion phase is proposed, which fuses source data with LLM-generated data based on their semantic importance, thereby enhancing task performance. Besides, a joint training objective that combines cross-entropy loss and reconstruction loss is proposed to reduce the impact of hallucination on CDG. Experiment results on three cross-modality retrieval tasks demonstrate that the proposed SC-LMKB can achieve up to 72.6\% and 90.7\% performance gains compared to conventional SC systems and LLM-enabled SC systems, respectively.