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Guangming Shi

Publications and source records attributed to Guangming Shi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Skillsets on the Chain: A Blockchain-based Zero-Trust Framework for Agentic AI Networking

Agentic AI networking (AgentNet) systems rely heavily on third-party skillset implementations and distributed multi-agent collaboration, yet they face major claim-to-capability inconsistencies and security vulnerabilities under trust-by-declaration assumptions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes TrustAgentNet, a dual-tier blockchain-secured zero-trust framework. Specifically, a global Chain of Skillsets (CoS) governs the lifecycle of skillset metadata with protocols empowered by specialized agents to enforce off-chain auditing while maintaining lightweight on-chain cryptographic consensus. Furthermore, transient, task-oriented Chains of Collaboration (CoC) are dynamically established to enable trustless distributed multi-agent collaboration. Theoretical analysis of the three-way trade-off among security level, task performance, and resource overhead is provided and empirically validated. Experimental results on a hardware prototype demonstrate that compared with no-blockchain trust-by-default baselines, the zero-trust overhead of TrustAgentNet is dominated by off-chain inference, while the blockchain layer incurs minor ledger costs via the ledger-IPFS storage and on/off-chain integration design. Crucially, the proposed verification pipeline achieves a flawless 100% accuracy across 50 AI models, correctly validating 40 honest skillsets and intercepting 10 adversarial ones, and generalizes to non-AI domains with an 83.91% accuracy and a 0.85 F1-score across 1478 features from 171 ClawHub skills. Adversarial experiments further show that TrustAgentNet enables autonomous skillset self-recovery against various malicious attacks.

cs.CR

AdaAnchor4D: Anchor-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Feature Aggregation for Monocular UAV 4D Reconstruction

Monocular UAV videos provide valuable observations for dynamic reconstruction of complex urban scenes. However, such scenes exhibit pronounced spatiotemporal heterogeneity: different regions follow distinct temporal activity patterns, while the motion states of some dynamic regions may further evolve over time. Although dynamic Gaussian methods based on decomposed shared spatiotemporal feature fields have achieved efficient and accurate reconstruction in object-centric or relatively compact scenes, their commonly adopted fixed plane-wise feature combination mechanisms are less suited to the heterogeneous local dynamics of UAV scenes, often leading to ghosting artifacts and blurred dynamic details. To address this challenge, we propose AdaAnchor4D, an adaptive anchor deformation framework for monocular UAV dynamic scene reconstruction. At its core, Anchor-Conditioned Feature Aggregation (ACFA) adaptively aggregates shared spatiotemporal features using anchor-specific aggregation embeddings and temporal information, allowing different local units to obtain dynamic representations tailored to their local and temporal states. Decoupled Local Geometry Deformation (DLGD) separates anchor-state deformation from local Gaussian geometry deformation, while Density-Adaptive Coordinate Warping (DACW) reparameterizes feature-query coordinates according to the axis-wise anchor distributions, alleviating the mismatch between non-uniform geometric sampling and uniform grid parameterization. Experiments on UAV-Arc4D, VisDrone, and UAVDT show that AdaAnchor4D achieves higher rendering quality than representative dynamic Gaussian methods while maintaining real-time rendering performance. The code will be made publicly available.

cs.CV

Semantic Sampling via Learnable Observation Front Ends

Sampling determines the form of information available to downstream reconstruction systems. Conventional lowrate sampling forms finite-dimensional observations directly from the raw waveform, with the sampling rule mainly guided by bandwidth, sparsity, or fixed signal-level structures. For acoustic signals such as speech, however, reconstruction-relevant information is often expressed through content-related spectral-temporal structures rather than waveform samples alone. This paper proposes semantic sampling via learnable observation front ends, where finite-dimensional observations are generated from learned signal responses instead of directly subsampled waveform points. The proposed front end consists of a semantic feature filterbank, a constrained semantic observation matrix, and a low-rate readout module. The filterbank maps the input waveform into multiple acoustic response channels, the observation matrix combines these responses into a small number of observation channels, and the readout module produces low-rate finite-dimensional samples. A reconstruction network is then used to recover the signal from the resulting observations. Experiments on low-rate speech reconstruction show that, under the same observation budget, the proposed semantic sampling front end provides more informative observations than fixed low-rate sampling and neural restoration methods based on predetermined low-rate waveforms. The improvements in waveform fidelity, spectral consistency, and perceptual quality show that learnable observation front ends preserve more useful information for acoustic signal reconstruction under the same observation budget.

eess.AS

Implicit Semantic-Aware Communication Based on Hypergraph Reasoning

Semantic-aware communication has emerged as a transformative paradigm for next-generation communication systems, shifting the fundamental goal from transmitting bit-level symbols to reliably recovering and understanding the semantic meaning of information. Previous studies have demonstrated that representing the semantic content of source messages as graph-based structures can significantly improve communication efficiency and the accuracy of semantic inference at the receiver. However, existing solutions typically employ graphs that capture only pairwise relationships, thereby neglecting higher-order implicit correlations commonly observed in real-world scenarios, such as group interactions, multi-entity associations, and complex relational contexts. This limitation reduces semantic expressiveness and makes semantic inference susceptible to ambiguity and performance degradation, particularly under noisy or corrupted channel conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hypergraph-based implicit semantic reasoning framework, HISR, which leverages hypergraphs to represent complex multi-entity relationships among semantic knowledge entities. In HISR, entities and their associated higher-order relations are mapped into dedicated semantic subspaces tailored to distinct relational contexts. This design not only disentangles diverse semantic interactions to mitigate the over-smoothing effects commonly found in traditional graph embedding methods but also enables robust semantic inference even when partial information loss occurs during transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed HISR achieves up to a 36.6% improvement in implicit semantic interpretation accuracy over the state-of-the-art benchmarks.

cs.AI

Generalization Bounds of Emergent Communications for Agentic AI Networking

The evolution of 6G networking toward agentic AI networking (AgentNet) systems requires a shift from traditional data pipelines to task-aware, agentic AI-native communication solutions. Emergent communication, a novel communication paradigm in which autonomous agents learn their own signaling protocols through interaction, is increasingly viewed as a promising solution to address the challenges posed by existing rigid, predefined protocol-based networking architecture. However, most existing emergent communication frameworks fail to account for physical networking constraints, such as bandwidth and computational complexity, and often lack a rigorous information-theoretical foundation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel emergent communication framework that facilitates collaborative task-solving among heterogeneous agents through an information-theoretic lens. We propose a novel joint loss function that unifies the optimization of decision-making functions and the learning of communication signaling. Our proposed solution is grounded on the multi-agent and multi-task distributed information bottleneck (DIB) theory, which allows the quantification of the fundamental trade-off between task-relevant information representation and computational complexity. We further provide theoretical generalization bounds of the emergent communication protocol during decentralized inference across unseen environmental states. Experimental validation on a real-world hardware prototype confirms that our proposed framework significantly improves generalization performance, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.

cs.AI

FUN: A Focal U-Net Combining Reconstruction and Object Detection for Snapshot Spectral Imaging

Conventional push-broom hyperspectral imaging suffers from slow acquisition speeds, precluding real-time object detection; in contrast, snapshot spectral imaging enables instantaneous hyperspectral images (HSIs) capture, making real-time object detection feasible, yet its potential is often compromised by time-consuming post-capture reconstruction. To address this issue, we propose the Focal U-shaped Network (FUN), a novel end-to-end framework that jointly performs HSI reconstruction and object detection via multi-task learning. FUN employs a shared U-shaped backbone, where reconstruction provides underlying spectral information while detection guides semantic-aware priors learning, facilitating mutually beneficial task interaction. Crucially, we introduce focal modulation, an efficient alternative to self-attention that modulates spatial and spectral features while reducing quadratic computational complexity, enabling a self-attention-free architecture for joint reconstruction and detection. Furthermore, we contribute a new HSI object detection dataset with 8712 annotated objects across 363 HSIs to facilitate evaluation of the proposed method. Experiments demonstrate that FUN achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks, using 40% fewer parameters and 30% less computation than recent alternatives, making it promising for future real-time edge deployment. The code and datasets are available: https://github.com/ShawnDong98/FUN.

cs.CV

SPAT: A Semantic Port-Aware Adaptive-Rate Transmission Protocol for Semantic Communication

With the evolution of 6G, semantic communication has emerged as a promising paradigm by prioritizing the delivery of task-relevant meaning over strict bit-level correctness. However, existing transport mechanisms still rely on explicit port headers and bit-level validation, making them vulnerable to header corruption and the resulting packet loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Semantic Port-Aware Adaptive-Rate Transmission Protocol (SPAT) for semantic communication. The proposed framework jointly embeds source and destination port information into semantic representations, thereby reducing dependence on explicit port headers while enabling robust port-aware transmission. Furthermore, a differentiated semantic processing mechanism is developed for uplink and downlink scenarios, where port identification is introduced for uplink service recognition and destination-aware conditional gating is designed for downlink selective decoding. In addition, an adaptive-rate controller is incorporated to dynamically adjust the number of transmitted semantic channels according to channel conditions and feature importance, thereby improving both robustness and transmission efficiency. Experimental results on the AFHQ and ImageNet-10 datasets, together with real-world experimental measurements, demonstrate that SPAT consistently outperforms TCP, UDP, and SITP in reconstruction quality across different SNRs while maintaining low-latency transmission.

eess.SP

Optimally Bridging Semantics and Data: Generative Semantic Communication via Schr\"odinger Bridge

Generative Semantic Communication (GSC) is a promising solution for image transmission over narrow-band and high-noise channels. However, existing GSC methods rely on long, indirect transport trajectories from a Gaussian to an image distribution guided by semantics, causing severe hallucination and high computational cost. To address this, we propose a general framework named Schr\"odinger Bridge-based GSC (SBGSC). By leveraging the Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) to construct optimal transport trajectories between arbitrary distributions, SBGSC breaks Gaussian limitations and enables direct generative decoding from semantics to images. Within this framework, we design Diffusion SB-based GSC (DSBGSC). DSBGSC reconstructs the nonlinear drift term of diffusion models using Schr\"odinger potentials, achieving direct optimal distribution transport to reduce hallucinations and computational overhead. To further accelerate generation, we propose a self-consistency-based objective guiding the model to learn a nonlinear velocity field pointing directly toward the image, bypassing Markovian noise prediction to significantly reduce sampling steps. Simulation results demonstrate that DSBGSC outperforms state-of-the-art GSC methods, improving FID by at least 38% and SSIM by 49.3%, while accelerating inference speed by over 8 times.

eess.IV

A3R: Agentic Affordance Reasoning via Cross-Dimensional Evidence in 3D Gaussian Scenes

Affordance reasoning in 3D Gaussian scenes aims to identify the region that supports the action specified by a given text instruction in complex environments. Existing methods typically cast this problem as one-shot prediction from static scene observations, assuming sufficient evidence is already available for reasoning. However, in complex 3D scenes, many failure cases arise not from weak prediction capacity, but from incomplete task-relevant evidence under fixed observations. To address this limitation, we reformulate fine-grained affordance reasoning as a sequential evidence acquisition process, where ambiguity is progressively reduced through complementary 3D geometric and 2D semantic evidence. Building on this formulation, we propose A3R, an agentic affordance reasoning framework that enables an MLLM-based policy to iteratively select evidence acquisition actions and update the affordance belief through cross-dimensional evidence acquisition. To optimize such sequential decision making, we further introduce a GRPO-based policy learning strategy that improves evidence acquisition efficiency and reasoning accuracy. Extensive experiments on scene-level benchmarks show that A3R consistently surpasses static one-shot baselines, demonstrating the advantage of agentic cross-dimensional evidence acquisition for fine-grained affordance reasoning in complex 3D Gaussian scenes.

cs.CV

Are VLMs Lost Between Sky and Space? LinkS$^2$Bench for UAV-Satellite Dynamic Cross-View Spatial Intelligence

Synergistic spatial intelligence between UAVs and satellites is indispensable for emergency response and security operations, as it uniquely integrates macro-scale global coverage with dynamic, real-time local perception. However, the capacity of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to master this complex interplay remains largely unexplored. This gap persists primarily because existing benchmarks are confined to isolated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) videos or static satellite imagery, failing to evaluate the dynamic local-to-global spatial mapping essential for comprehensive cross-view reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LinkS$^2$Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' wide-area, dynamic cross-view spatial intelligence. LinkS$^2$Bench links 1,022 minutes of dynamic UAV footage with high-resolution satellite imagery covering over 200 km$^2$. Through an LMM-assisted pipeline and rigorous human annotation, we constructed 17.9k high-quality question-answer pairs comprising 12 fine-grained tasks across four dimensions: perception, localization, relation, and reasoning. Evaluations of 18 representative VLMs reveal a substantial gap compared to human baselines, identifying accurate cross-view dynamic alignment as the critical bottleneck. To alleviate this, we design a Cross-View Alignment Adapter, demonstrating that explicit alignment significantly improves model performance. Furthermore, fine-tuning experiments underscore the potential of LinkS$^2$Bench in advancing VLM adaptation for complex spatial reasoning.

cs.CV

Scaling Dense Event-Stream Pretraining from Visual Foundation Models

Learning versatile, fine-grained representations from irregular event streams is pivotal yet nontrivial, primarily due to the heavy annotation that hinders scalability in dataset size, semantic richness, and application scope. To mitigate this dilemma, we launch a novel self-supervised pretraining method that distills visual foundation models (VFMs) to push the boundaries of event representation at scale. Specifically, we curate an extensive synchronized image-event collection to amplify cross-modal alignment. Nevertheless, due to inherent mismatches in sparsity and granularity between image-event domains, existing distillation paradigms are prone to semantic collapse in event representations, particularly at high resolutions. To bridge this gap, we propose to extend the alignment objective to semantic structures provided off-the-shelf by VFMs, indicating a broader receptive field and stronger supervision. The key ingredient of our method is a structure-aware distillation loss that grounds higher-quality image-event correspondences for alignment, optimizing dense event representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach takes a great leap in downstream benchmarks, significantly surpassing traditional methods and existing pretraining techniques. This breakthrough manifests in enhanced generalization, superior data efficiency and elevated transferability.

cs.CV

On the Rate-Distortion-Complexity Tradeoff for Semantic Communication

Semantic communication is a novel communication paradigm that focuses on conveying the user's intended meaning rather than the bit-wise transmission of source signals. One of the key challenges is to effectively represent and extract the semantic meaning of any given source signals. While deep learning (DL)-based solutions have shown promising results in extracting implicit semantic information from a wide range of sources, existing work often overlooks the high computational complexity inherent in both model training and inference for the DL-based encoder and decoder. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a rate-distortion-complexity (RDC) framework which extends the classical rate-distortion theory by incorporating the constraints on semantic distance, including both the traditional bit-wise distortion metric and statistical difference-based divergence metric, and complexity measure, adopted from the theory of minimum description length and information bottleneck. We derive the closed-form theoretical results of the minimum achievable rate under given constraints on semantic distance and complexity for both Gaussian and binary semantic sources. Our theoretical results show a fundamental three-way tradeoff among achievable rate, semantic distance, and model complexity. Extensive experiments on real-world image and video datasets validate this tradeoff and further demonstrate that our information-theoretic complexity measure effectively correlates with practical computational costs, guiding efficient system design in resource-constrained scenarios.

cs.IT

SANet: A Semantic-aware Agentic AI Networking Framework for Cross-layer Optimization in 6G

Agentic AI networking (AgentNet) is a novel AI-native networking paradigm in which a large number of specialized AI agents collaborate to perform autonomous decision-making, dynamic environmental adaptation, and complex missions. It has the potential to facilitate real-time network management and optimization functions, including self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-adaptation across diverse and complex environments. This paper proposes SANet, a novel semantic-aware AgentNet architecture for wireless networks that can infer the semantic goal of the user and automatically assign agents associated with different layers of the network to fulfill the inferred goal. Motivated by the fact that AgentNet is a decentralized framework in which collaborating agents may generally have different and even conflicting objectives, we formulate the decentralized optimization of SANet as a multi-agent multi-objective problem, and focus on finding the Pareto-optimal solution for agents with distinct and potentially conflicting objectives. We propose three novel metrics for evaluating SANet. Furthermore, we develop a model partition and sharing (MoPS) framework in which large models, e.g., deep learning models, of different agents can be partitioned into shared and agent-specific parts that are jointly constructed and deployed according to agents' local computational resources. Two decentralized optimization algorithms are proposed. We derive theoretical bounds and prove that there exists a three-way tradeoff among optimization, generalization, and conflicting errors. We develop an open-source RAN and core network-based hardware prototype that implements agents to interact with three different layers of the network. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieved performance gains of up to 14.61% while requiring only 44.37% of FLOPs required by state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.AI

NOC4SC: A Bandwidth-Efficient Multi-User Semantic Communication Framework for Interference-Resilient Transmission

With the explosive growth of connected devices and emerging applications, current wireless networks are encountering unprecedented demands for massive user access, where the inter-user interference has become a critical challenge to maintaining high quality of service (QoS) in multi-user communication systems. To tackle this issue, we propose a bandwidth-efficient semantic communication paradigm termed Non-Orthogonal Codewords for Semantic Communication (NOC4SC), which enables simultaneous same-frequency transmission without spectrum spreading. By leveraging the Swin Transformer, the proposed NOC4SC framework enables each user to independently extract semantic features through a unified encoder-decoder architecture with shared network parameters across all users, which ensures that the user's data remains protected from unauthorized decoding. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive NOC and SNR Modulation (NSM) block, which employs deep learning to dynamically regulate SNR and generate approximately orthogonal semantic features within distinct feature subspaces, thereby effectively mitigating inter-user interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed NOC4SC achieves comparable performance to the DeepJSCC-PNOMA and outperforms other multi-user SemCom baseline methods.

eess.IV

SITP: A High-Reliability Semantic Information Transport Protocol Without Retransmission for Semantic Communication

With the evolution of 6G networks, modern communication systems are facing unprecedented demands for high reliability and low latency. However, conventional transport protocols are designed for bit-level reliability, failing to meet the semantic robustness requirements. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel Semantic Information Transport Protocol (SITP), which achieves TCP-level reliability and UDP level latency by verifying only packet headers while retaining potentially corrupted payloads for semantic decoding. Building upon SITP, a cross-layer analytical model is established to quantify packet-loss probability across the physical, data-link, network, transport, and application layers. The model provides a unified probabilistic formulation linking signal noise rate (SNR) and packet-loss rate, offering theoretical foundation into end-to-end semantic transmission. Furthermore, a cross-image feature interleaving mechanism is developed to mitigate consecutive burst losses by redistributing semantic features across multiple correlated images, thereby enhancing robustness in burst-fade channels. Extensive experiments show that SITP offers lower latency than TCP with comparable reliability at low SNRs, while matching UDP-level latency and delivering superior reconstruction quality. In addition, the proposed cross-image semantic interleaving mechanism further demonstrates its effectiveness in mitigating degradation caused by bursty packet losses.

eess.IV

Feature Partitioning and Semantic Equalization for Intrinsic Robustness in Semantic Communication under Packet Loss

Semantic communication can improve transmission efficiency by focusing on task-relevant information. However, under packet-based communication protocols, any error typically results in the loss of an entire packet, making semantic communication particularly vulnerable to packet loss. Since high-dimensional semantic features must be partitioned into one-dimensional transmission units during packetization. A critical open question is how to partition semantic features to maximize robustness. To address this, we systematically investigate the performance of two mainstream architectures, Transformer and Convolutional neural networks (CNN), under various feature partitioning schemes. The results show that the Transformer architecture exhibits inherent robustness to packet loss when partitioned along the channel dimension. In contrast, the CNN-based baseline exhibits imbalanced channel utilization, causing severe degradation once dominant channels are lost. To enhance the CNN resilience, we propose a lightweight Semantic Equalization Mechanism (SEM) that balances channel contributions and prevents a few channels from dominating. SEM consists of two parallel approaches: a Dynamic Scale module that adaptively adjusts channel importance, and a Broadcast module that facilitates information interaction among channels. Experimental results demonstrate that CNN equipped with SEM achieve graceful degradation under packet loss (retaining about 85% of lossless PSNR at 40% packet loss), comparable to that of Transformer models. Our findings indicate that, under an appropriate partitioning strategy, maintaining a balanced semantic representation is a fundamental condition for achieving intrinsic robustness against packet loss. These insights may also extend to other modalities such as video and support practical semantic communication design.

eess.SY

Variable-Length Joint Source-Channel Coding for Semantic Communication

This paper investigates a key challenge faced by joint source-channel coding (JSCC) in digital semantic communication (SemCom): the incompatibility between existing JSCC schemes that yield continuous encoded representations and digital systems that employ discrete variable-length codewords. It further results in feasibility issues in achieving physical bit-level rate control via such JSCC approaches for efficient semantic transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end coding (E2EC) framework to tackle it. The semantic coding problem is formed by extending the information bottleneck (IB) theory over noisy channels, which is a tradeoff between bit-level communication rate and semantic distortion. With a structural decomposition of encoding to handle code length and content respectively, we can construct an end-to-end trainable encoder that supports the direct compression of a data source into a finite codebook. To optimize our E2EC across non-differentiable operations, e.g., sampling, we use the powerful policy gradient to support gradient-based updates. Experimental results illustrate that E2EC achieves high inference quality with low bit rates, outperforming representative baselines compatible with digital SemCom systems.

cs.IT

Distributed Information Bottleneck Theory for Multi-Modal Task-Aware Semantic Communication

Semantic communication shifts the focus from bit-level accuracy to task-relevant semantic delivery, enabling efficient and intelligent communication for next-generation networks. However, existing multi-modal solutions often process all available data modalities indiscriminately, ignoring that their contributions to downstream tasks are often unequal. This not only leads to severe resource inefficiency but also degrades task inference performance due to irrelevant or redundant information. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel task-aware distributed information bottleneck (TADIB) framework, which quantifies the contribution of any set of modalities to given tasks. Based on this theoretical framework, we design a practical coding scheme that intelligently selects and compresses only the most task-relevant modalities at the transmitter. To find the optimal selection and the codecs in the network, we adopt the probabilistic relaxation of discrete selection, enabling distributed encoders to make coordinated decisions with score function estimation and common randomness. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our solution matches or surpasses the inference quality of full-modal baselines while significantly reducing communication and computational costs.

cs.IT