Heterogeneous 2D/1D Signal Representation Fusion for Underwater Acoustic Modulation Recognition Under Distribution Shift

Abstract

Modulation recognition systems rely on heterogeneous signal representations. 2D signal-image modalities such as time-frequency and cyclostationary maps capture structural patterns, while 1D statistical descriptors such as higher-order power spectra encode complementary cues. Under distribution shift, these modalities degrade unevenly, making robust fusion a central challenge for practical deployment. Progress is further limited by the lack of a unified evaluation protocol that systematically separates different shift types. This paper addresses both challenges through a joint benchmark-and-model study in underwater acoustic modulation recognition. UAMR-ShiftBench is the first benchmark to jointly cover in-distribution, low-SNR, unseen-environment, unseen-communication-parameter, and measured sea-trial evaluation under a single matched protocol, with two independent real-world subsets collected during two sea-trial campaigns conducted in March and November in the South China Sea. SCP-TriCA fuses STFT, cyclostationary, and P2/P4 (second- and fourth-order power spectra) modalities hierarchically: the two 2D modalities are first aligned through bidirectional cross-attention, and the 1D statistical modality is then incorporated through a sample-adaptive selective gate. On UAMR-ShiftBench, SCP-TriCA achieves 95.33% in-distribution accuracy and 74.59% simulated OOD average, outperforming the strongest baseline by 5.12 percentage points, and reaches 91.14% and 94.86% on the two sea-trial subsets, exceeding the best baseline by 15.71 and 23.00 percentage points respectively. Ablation results confirm that the gains stem from modality complementarity and the hierarchical fusion design. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ronglaiqian/UAMR-ShiftBench.