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Giuseppe Caire

Publications and source records attributed to Giuseppe Caire.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Learning-based near- versus far-field boundaries for ultra-massive MIMO communications

Signal processing techniques for wireless communications and sensing fundamentally differ between near-field and far-field propagation regimes. Accurately identifying the applicable propagation region is therefore essential for enabling efficient beamforming and channel estimation in ultra-massive MIMO (UM-MIMO) systems. This paper proposes a fully unsupervised learning framework to distinguish near-field from far-field propagation based solely on received signal measurements, before estimating the communication distance, and without relying on channel state information. The proposed approach exploits spatial signal power variations across subarrays of a UM array as a physics-inspired feature extraction stage, followed by the OPTICS clustering algorithm to infer the communication region. Simulation results under various system configurations and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels demonstrate that the proposed method accurately identifies the near-field and far-field regions, showing agreement with theoretical boundaries.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Exploiting Mutual Coupling Structure for Channel Estimation of Active RIS-Assisted Links

Accurate channel modeling and estimation of active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted links with densely integrated elements are essential to fully unleashing this technology's potential. This work adopts a physically consistent model incorporating mutual coupling (MC) effects, modeled via scattering parameters, in RIS-aided communication. We formulate the MC-aware channel estimation as a compressed sensing (CS) problem. The MC effect leads to an increase in the sensing matrix dimensions. This increased dimensionality substantially elevates the complexity of the formulated CS problem. To overcome this, we propose a low-complexity estimator that leverages the structure of the scattering matrix and MC mechanisms to obtain a reduced-size design sensing matrix. Numerical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms MC-unaware estimators by several dBs, achieving accuracy comparable to fully MC-aware solutions but with significantly lower complexity.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

SemISAC: Semantic Integrated Sensing and Communications

Conventional integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems primarily integrate communications and sensing through shared physical resources, without explicitly exploiting task-relevant semantic information. To move beyond such physical-level integration, we propose semantic ISAC (SemISAC), a general framework that unifies semantic communication (SemCom) and semantic sensing (SemS) to convey source meaning and acquire environmental meaning. Specifically, the transmitter combines source semantics and sensing task information with available side information to design the shared waveform and allocate radio resources, while the receiver-side communication and sensing task decoders recover the source meaning and infer the required environmental information, respectively. We also provide an information-theoretic interpretation to characterize the relationship between physical and task-relevant information and the resulting semantic trade-off in SemISAC. Building on this framework, we formulate the general SemISAC design problem and propose two realization methods, namely end-to-end (E2E) SemISAC optimization and modular SemISAC optimization. As a concrete realization, we apply modular SemISAC optimization to jointly design a learnable time-frequency (TF) precoder in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system for representative SemCom and SemS tasks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed realization reduces sensing semantic distortion under a given communication requirement and achieves a more favorable communication-sensing trade-off than baseline designs.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Environment-Aware Diffusion Model for Massive MIMO-OFDM Channel Estimation

This paper proposes an environment-aware diffusion based channel estimation in massive multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. The high dimensionality of massive MIMO channels combined with limited pilot resources makes accurate estimation challenging. To address this issue, we exploit the spatial variability of wireless channels by training a diffusion model to learn the location-conditioned distribution of channel state information, which provides an environment-aware prior for channel estimation. Based on this learned prior, a posterior inference algorithm is developed to incorporate pilot observations into the reverse diffusion process, enabling Bayesian channel estimation by combining the received-signal likelihood with the learned channel prior. By jointly leveraging location information and measurement data, the proposed approach improves estimation accuracy under limited pilot resources. Simulation results based on ray-tracing channel datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms conventional estimators and existing learning-based approaches across various signal-to-noise ratios and pilot configurations.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Prior-Aided Masked Vector Quantization CSI Feedback for FDD Massive MIMO Systems

Downlink channel state information (CSI) feedback is a key bottleneck in frequency-division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO systems, as the user equipment (UE) must convey its estimated channel to the base station (BS) over a limited uplink (UL) budget. To improve CSI reconstruction accuracy under tight feedback constraints, we propose prior-aided masked vector quantization (PM-VQ), a learning-based separate source--channel coding (SSCC) feedback scheme conditioned on the average angle--delay power map---a compact representation of the channel second-order statistics available at both the UE and the BS. In PM-VQ, a prior-aided encoder maps the CSI to latent tokens, and a spatially-adaptive masking module (SAMM) scores and selects the most informative tokens within the feedback budget. The selected tokens are vector-quantized and fed back together with their positions, while an adaptive de-masking module (ADM) completes the latent representation at the BS before prior-conditioned decoding. To support variable-rate compression, a single model is trained over a range of selected-token counts, enabling operation across multiple feedback dimensions without retraining. We evaluate PM-VQ against three representative baselines on a Sionna-generated 3GPP TR~38.901 UMa dataset, focusing on the most challenging diffuse regime where channel energy is spread across many angle--delay coefficients. Simulation results show that PM-VQ achieves the lowest NMSE across all tested SNR levels and feedback dimensions in this regime. Moreover, the angle--delay power-map prior remains beneficial even when estimated from only a few channel realizations.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Discrete Codebook Design for Self-interference Suppression in mmWave ISAC

This paper presents discrete codebook synthesis methods for self-interference (SI) suppression in a mmWave device, designed to support full-duplex (FD) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). We formulate a signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) maximization problem that optimizes the receiver (RX) and transmitter (TX) codewords, aimed at suppressing the near-field SI signal while maintaining the beamforming gain in the far-field sensing directions. The formulation considers the practical constraints of discrete RX and TX codebooks with quantized phase settings, as well as a TX beamforming gain requirement in the specified communication direction. Under an alternating optimization framework, the RX and TX codewords are iteratively optimized, with one fixed while the other is optimized. When the TX codeword is fixed, the RX codeword optimization problem is formulated as an integer quadratic fractional programming (IQFP) problem. Using Dinkelbach's algorithm, we transform it into a sequence of subproblems in which the numerator and denominator are decoupled, and solve these subproblems efficiently by the spherical search (SS) method. This approach is referred to as FP-SS. When the RX codeword is fixed, the TX codeword optimization is similarly an IQFP problem, but an additional TX beamforming constraint for communication must be considered; it is solved through Dinkelbach's transformation followed by the constrained spherical search (CSS), which we refer to as FP-CSS. We prove that both methods find the optimal solutions to their respective codebook optimization problems. Simulations show that FP-SS and FP-CSS achieve the same SI suppression performance as their corresponding exhaustive search (ES) methods, confirming their optimality, but at much lower complexity. Integrating them into the alternating optimization framework yields even better SI suppression performance.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Taming Subpacketization without Sacrificing Communication: A Packet Type-based Framework for D2D Coded Caching

Finite-length design is essential for making coded caching practical, as the optimal communication gains of existing schemes often require prohibitively large subpacketization. This paper studies rate-optimal device-to-device (D2D) coded caching with reduced subpacketization. We propose a packet type-based (PT) framework that exploits the geometric structure induced by user grouping. Under this structure, subfiles, packets, and multicast groups are classified into types, allowing the originally symmetric Ji-Caire-Molisch (JCM) design~\cite{ji2016fundamental} to be systematically relaxed without sacrificing the optimal D2D communication rate. The key feature of the PT framework is that subpacketization reduction is achieved through two complementary mechanisms: \emph{subfile saving}, by excluding redundant subfile types, and \emph{further-splitting saving}, by assigning type-dependent further-splitting factors to subfiles through transmitter selection. The type-dependent splitting factors are then coordinated across multicast group types to produce a globally consistent file-splitting structure. Based on this framework, we construct several classes of rate-optimal D2D coded caching schemes that strictly improve upon the JCM subpacketization. The proposed schemes achieve either order-wise reductions in the number of users or constant-factor reductions over broad memory regimes, while preserving the optimal rate. These results reveal a structural distinction between D2D and shared-link coded caching: unlike in the shared-link setting, full symmetric subpacketization is not necessary for rate-optimal D2D caching.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Low-Complexity Near-Field Channel Estimation and Subcarrier-Cooperative Hybrid Precoding for Wideband XL-MIMO OFDM Systems

This paper addresses both accurate near-field channel acquisition and scalable precoding for wideband extremely large aperture MIMO (XL-MIMO) OFDM systems, with particular focus on reducing complexity. In the considered system, each MIMO multipath component is characterized by five continuous angle-distance-delay parameters, making conventional sparse recovery methods computationally infeasible while suffering from grid mismatch. We propose a decoupled off-grid channel estimation algorithm based on sequential sparse Bayesian learning (SBL). By exploiting the separable structure of the OFDM near-field atom, the five-dimensional joint search is replaced by a sequence of low-dimensional operations and active-set inference, avoiding multiplicative scaling with the per-dimension grid sizes. A continuous-domain Newton refinement is incorporated based on the exact marginal likelihood to mitigate the grid mismatch. Based on the estimated multipath parameters, we then develop a subcarrier-cooperative hybrid precoding framework for multiuser wideband transmission. A large-scale-matrix-inversion-free alternating optimization algorithm is established to maximize the sum user rate, together with a non-iterative low-complexity design that exploits the parameterized channel structure and provides an effective initialization. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the estimation methods compared to several benchmarks and the effectiveness of the precoding algorithm based on estimated channel parameters.

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arXiv2026

Joint Random Access and Localization in Cell-Free User-Centric Networks with Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

We study random access (RACH) schemes for cell-free (CF) user-centric networks to handle many geographically distributed users with sporadic traffic and intermittent activity. The RACH must allow the system to: 1) detect preambles sent by the (yet unknown) random access users in the RACH slot; 2) localize them for fast allocation of user-centric radio-unit (RU) clusters. Most prior work uses simplified models, neglecting frame-synchronous but chip-asynchronous transmission, possible line-of-sight (LoS) propagation for certain user-RU pairs, and multipath non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation yielding frequency-selective channels. Building on our previous work, we consider location-dependent partitioned random access codebooks where users in a geographic area (location) use the corresponding subset of random access preambles. We present a unified framework for joint detection and localization over a spatially consistent network-wide channel model, incorporating these neglected aspects. We evaluate two schemes: 1) a ``legacy'' scheme using Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences, extending the 3GPP 2-step RACH to the CF case; 2) our multisource approximate message passing (AMP) approach extended to multipath frequency-selective fading. For both schemes, we develop novel approximated GLRT preamble detection and Maximum-Likelihood position estimators with super-resolution refinement, implicitly exploiting received signal strength, angle of arrival, and time-difference of arrival information embedded into LoS components. Numerical results show that the AMP-based scheme achieves superior preamble detection, while both schemes have similar and excellent localization capability.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Random Access and Localization in Cell-Free User-Centric Networks with Multipath Channels

In a wireless network, the initial/random access mechanism (RACH) allows idle/new users to join the network and (possibly) request allocated transmission resources for subsequent traffic. Building on our own previous work, for cell-free user-centric networks, we consider location-dependent random access codebooks such that users in a certain geographic area (location) make use of the corresponding set of random access preambles (codewords). We expand our previous work in two ways: (1) we consider multipath channels with line-of-sight (LoS) propagation within a given radius; (2) we consider two different approaches. The first makes use of Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences and GLRT detection to cope with the unknown delay, and it is conceptually similar to the 3GPP 2-step RACH specification (here extended to the cell-free case). The second builds on our previous work on multisource approximate message passing (AMP). For both schemes, we also consider a novel near Maximum-Likelihood approach for localization of the random access users directly from the detected RACH preambles, implicitly using angle of arrival and time difference of arrival information embedded into the LoS components. Simulation results show that the AMP approach achieves generally better performance for random access user detection, while both approaches have similar localization capability with a slight superiority for the frequency-domain scheme.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Learning-Aided Short Code Design for ISAC based on MIMO-OFDM

This paper proposes a deep learning (DL)-based coded waveform design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), enabling flexible trade-offs between communication reliability and ranging accuracy in short-block transmissions. The proposed scheme is built upon a practical multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) architecture, where the communication channel state information and the angles of the static targets are assumed available at the transmitter. A transformer-based transmitter encodes input information bits directly into ISAC transmit waveforms to jointly optimize the bit error rate (BER) performance and the delay modified Cramer-Rao bound (MCRB). A corresponding transformer-based receiver is adopted at the communication side to recover the transmitted information bits. We further examine the learned codewords for communication-oriented and sensing-oriented designs, revealing that a balanced ISAC waveform naturally exhibits an intermediate structure between these two extremes. Numerical results illustrate these codeword structures and demonstrate that the proposed design provides substantial trade-off gains over conventional schemes based on standard channel coding and modulation.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

ComVLA: Communication-Aware Split Inference for VLA Models in 6G-Connected Robotics

Connected robotics is an emerging 6G application where mobile robots follow natural-language instructions to manipulate physical objects. The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that enable this are too large to run on the robot; a common trend is to offload inference to the cloud. The wireless link, however, limits how much sensing data the edge can transmit per control step. Two recent lines address this constraint: semantic communication codecs compress sensor data but require channel-specific retraining, and VLA token pruners select tokens from image but ignore the channel. Our insight is that the dense semantic information contained in the language already indicates which visual tokens matter. We propose ComVLA, a framework that uses this language guidance to adapt the VLA token budget to the channel capacity. Transmitting 32 tokens instead of 512 on the LIBERO benchmark, ComVLA cuts inference compute by 74% and inference latency by 22% versus the original OpenVLA-OFT baseline, at a cost of 1.5 pp in average task success (95.4% vs. 96.9%), and it stays within the capacity budget under Rayleigh and Rician fading. These results demonstrate that co-designing VLA inference and wireless communication is a practical direction for 6G-connected robotics.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

Semantic and goal-oriented communication is increasingly studied for 6G, but generalization beyond seen data remains a key weakness under tight rate budgets. Many existing systems overfit their training data and degrade sharply at very low bit rates because they attempt to compress the entire signal. We introduce Foundation Model-Guided Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication (FMSGOC), a framework that uses broad visual-linguistic Foundation Model priors to mitigate overfitting. It further improves rate efficiency by concentrating bits on sparse, goal-aligned anchors and relying on generative foundation-model priors to reconstruct the masked regions. By decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct, a vision-language foundation model selects and transmits a sparse set of semantic anchors, while a pretrained diffusion model, fine-tuned for masked completion, reconstructs the image at the receiver. In our experiments, FMSGOC reaches 0.039 bits per pixel (BPP), maintains high semantic fidelity (cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 on CIFAR-10), remains robust on previously unseen inputs (0.83-0.86 on ImageNet), and shows good perceptual similarity (0.1278/0.1558, CIFAR-10/ImageNet), outperforming strong end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Spectral-Efficient MIMO-OFDM: Low-Complexity Solution based on Random Multiplexing

This paper presents a low-complexity precoded MIMO-OFDM system for achieving improved spectral efficiency (SE) via intentionally compressing information symbols among subcarriers. Particularly, the proposed scheme leverages the powerful random multiplexing mechanism for precoding, and adopts the linear-complexity orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) estimator for symbol detection, where the compatibility with the existing fifth generation (5G) architectures is fully preserved. We further provide the theoretical analysis based on the replica-symmetric (RS) formula. This analysis confirms the advantages of the proposed system with respect to the adopted compression ratios, where an interesting phase transition behavior is verified. Numerical results coincide with our analysis and demonstrate significant improvements in terms of achievable rates and bit error rate (BER) compared to conventional MIMO-OFDM counterpart, making the proposed scheme a promising solution to 6G and beyond wireless networks.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Semantic Reconstruction and 3-D Detection via Learned Multi-Pair Fusion in RF Imaging

We consider a multistatic radio-frequency imaging problem with anisotropy, in which the reflection from a point depends on the positions of the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) arrays. The goal is to label the voxels of a field of view by a finite set of semantic classes and to group them into object instances. For the image formation of each Tx--Rx pair we apply a standard inverse-problem solver, and we feed the resulting per-pair reconstructions into a trained three-dimensional (3-D) U-Net that performs the fusion implicitly and the per-voxel classification explicitly. On a controlled, under-determined multistatic setup, we consider the following image formation methods: back-projection (BP) and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) from a single deterministic snapshot, and incoherent BP and group-LASSO from multiple fading snapshots. For each imaging method we train a separate U-Net that fuses the six Tx--Rx pairs (its input channels) and assigns each voxel a probability vector over the classes. Taking the most probable class gives a labeled volume---the semantic reconstruction. Object instances and their oriented bounding boxes then follow by geometric post-processing (clustering and principal-component analysis). Across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio, the semantic reconstruction (scored against ground truth by segmentation intersection-over-union) and the resulting 3-D detection degrade far more gracefully than the classical intensity reconstruction: the detection in particular stays reliable well into noise levels at which that reconstruction has dissolved. Because real scenes contain objects of classes the network was not trained on, we add an explicit unknown class trained by outlier exposure, which labels held-out novel objects as unknown instead of mislabeling them as a known class by reconstructed shape.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Intelligent Wiretap Code Design: Exploiting Wireless Endogenous Security via Information Theory and Deep Learning Integration

Recent advancements in wireless endogenous security have explored leveraging the inherent randomness of wireless channels to enhance communication security, providing an effective alternative to traditional encryption methods. This paper proposes a wiretap coding scheme within the semantic communication framework, which leverages discrete semantic representations compatible with conventional digital modulation to jointly enhance communication security and reliability. We investigate two eavesdropping scenarios: (i) the eavesdropper employs a maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder, and (ii) the eavesdropper has access to a decoder identical to that of the legitimate receiver. In the first scenario, we exploit mutual information as a metric to guide the design of an optimized coding strategy, minimizing information leakage while enhancing communication reliability. In the second scenario, considering the limitations of the eavesdropper's decoding capability, we employ generalized mutual information (GMI) to characterize recoverability under the prescribed decoding rule and guide reliability-aware code optimization.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Near-Field Communications with Different Array Geometries: Rayleigh Distance, Channel Estimation, and Transmission Design

This work establishes a framework of near-field communication under different array geometries of extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO). We first formulate the near-field spatial non-stationary channel model which is characterized by the distance between the user and each antenna on uniform and modular curved arrays. By fixing the total number of antennas while varying the degree of curvature, we investigate a fair case where the horizontal arc length of the curved array is the same as the planar array. We explicitly unveil the non-trivial impact of array curvature on extending the near-field region for cell edges. Then, for arbitrary array geometries and arbitrary-field channels, we estimate the spatial-domain channel by tackling a compressed sensing problem with a learned regularizer. Without relying on specific codebooks, we propose a denoising autoencoder (AE)-aided approximated message passing (AMP) algorithm and provide the corresponding theoretical replica bound. Finally, based on the estimated channel, we propose an optimization algorithm to maximize the sum user rate for sub-connected XL-MIMO systems by jointly designing the array geometry and hybrid precoding in the downlink. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed AE-AMP algorithm can effectively estimate the spatial non-stationary near-field channels with robustness and generalities compared to several conventional and deep-learning-based benchmarks. The improvement of data rate by using modular curved arrays with the estimated channel is also validated.

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