arXiv subjects

Shilian Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Shilian Zheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Deep Learning for Multi-Antenna Modulation Recognition of Radio Signals

Multi-antenna receiving systems have become a prevalent technical solution in communication systems. Meanwhile, deep learning has achieved significant progress in automatic modulation recognition tasks in single-antenna systems. However, the application of deep learning in multi-antenna modulation recognition (MAMR) tasks is still limited. In this paper, we propose an MAMR method namely MAMR-IQ to fully explore the diversity gain of a multi-antenna receiving system, which concatenates the raw received in-phase and quadrature (IQ) signals of multiple antennas and feeds them into a convolutional neural network. Simulation results show that the proposed MAMR-IQ method outperforms two existing deep learning-based MAMR methods which are based on direct voting (DV) and weight average (WA) in terms of both recognition accuracy and computational complexity. To address the problem of limited training data in few-shot scenarios, we further propose a data augmentation method that involves exchanging IQ sequences received by any two antennas to generate augmented samples. Simulation results show that with the proposed augmentation method, the recognition accuracy can be further improved.

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arXiv2026

Unsupervised Equivalent Contrastive Learning for Radio Signal Recognition

Robust radio signal recognition is fundamental to spectrum management, electromagnetic space security, and intelligent wireless applications, yet existing deep-learning methods rely heavily on large labeled datasets and struggle to capture the multi-domain characteristics inherent in real-world signals. To address these limitations, we propose an unsupervised equivalent contrastive learning method that leverages four information-lossless equivalent transformations, spanning the time, instantaneous, frequency, and time-frequency domains, to construct multi-view and semantically consistent representations of each signal. An equivalent contrastive learning strategy then aligns these complementary views to learn discriminative and transferable embeddings without requiring labeled data. Once pre-training is completed, the resulting model can be directly fine-tuned on downstream tasks using only raw signal samples, without reapplying any equivalent transformations, which reduces computational overhead and simplifies deployment. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art contrastive baselines under linear evaluation, few-shot semi-supervised learning, and cross-domain transfer settings. Notably, the learned representations yield substantial gains in few-shot regimes and challenging channel conditions, confirming the effectiveness of multi-domain equivalent modeling in enhancing robustness and generalization. This work establishes a principled pathway for exploiting massive unlabeled radio data and provides a foundation for future self-supervised learning frameworks in wireless systems.

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arXiv2025

T-ADD: Enhancing DOA Estimation Robustness Against Adversarial Attacks

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. However, recent studies have shown that adversarial perturbations can severely compromise the performance of such models. To address this vulnerability, we propose Transformer-based Adversarial Defense for DOA estimation (T-ADD), a transformer-based defense method designed to counter adversarial attacks. To achieve a balance between robustness and estimation accuracy, we formulate the adversarial defense as a joint reconstruction task and introduce a tailored joint loss function. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with three state-of-the-art adversarial defense methods, the proposed T-ADD significantly mitigates the adverse effects of widely used adversarial attacks, leading to notable improvements in the adversarial robustness of the DOA model.

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arXiv2025

WK-Pnet: FM-Based Positioning via Wavelet Packet Decomposition and Knowledge Distillation

Accurate and efficient positioning in complex environments is critical for applications where traditional satellite-based systems face limitations, such as indoors or urban canyons. This paper introduces WK-Pnet, an FM-based indoor positioning framework that combines wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) and knowledge distillation. WK-Pnet leverages WPD to extract rich time-frequency features from FM signals, which are then processed by a deep learning model for precise position estimation. To address computational demands, we employ knowledge distillation, transferring insights from a high-capacity model to a streamlined student model, achieving substantial reductions in complexity without sacrificing accuracy. Experimental results across diverse environments validate WK-Pnet's superior positioning accuracy and lower computational requirements, making it a viable solution for positioning in real-time resource-constraint applications.

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arXiv2025

Deep Learning-Based Wideband Spectrum Sensing with Dual-Representation Inputs and Subband Shuffling Augmentation

The widespread adoption of mobile communication technology has led to a severe shortage of spectrum resources, driving the development of cognitive radio technologies aimed at improving spectrum utilization, with spectrum sensing being the key enabler. This paper presents a novel deep learning-based wideband spectrum sensing framework that leverages multi-taper power spectral inputs to achieve high-precision and sample-efficient sensing. To enhance sensing accuracy, we incorporate a feature fusion strategy that combines multiple power spectrum representations. To tackle the challenge of limited sample sizes, we propose two data augmentation techniques designed to expand the training set and improve the network's detection probability. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio conditions, achieving higher detection probabilities and lower false alarm rates. The method also exhibits strong robustness across various scenarios, highlighting its significant potential for practical applications in wireless communication systems.

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arXiv2025

DS-Pnet: FM-Based Positioning via Downsampling

In this paper we present DS-Pnet, a novel framework for FM signal-based positioning that addresses the challenges of high computational complexity and limited deployment in resource-constrained environments. Two downsampling methods-IQ signal downsampling and time-frequency representation downsampling-are proposed to reduce data dimensionality while preserving critical positioning features. By integrating with the lightweight MobileViT-XS neural network, the framework achieves high positioning accuracy with significantly reduced computational demands. Experiments on real-world FM signal datasets demonstrate that DS-Pnet achieves superior performance in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, with space and time complexity reductions of approximately 87% and 99.5%, respectively, compared to an existing method, FM-Pnet. Despite the high compression, DS-Pnet maintains robust positioning accuracy, offering an optimal balance between efficiency and precision.

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arXiv2024

Mixing Signals: Data Augmentation Approach for Deep Learning Based Modulation Recognition

With the rapid development of deep learning, automatic modulation recognition (AMR), as an important task in cognitive radio, has gradually transformed from traditional feature extraction and classification to automatic classification by deep learning technology. However, deep learning models are data-driven methods, which often require a large amount of data as the training support. Data augmentation, as the strategy of expanding dataset, can improve the generalization of the deep learning models and thus improve the accuracy of the models to a certain extent. In this paper, for AMR of radio signals, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on mixing signals and consider four specific methods (Random Mixing, Maximum-Similarity-Mixing, $θ-$Similarity Mixing and n-times Random Mixing) to achieve data augmentation. Experiments show that our proposed method can improve the classification accuracy of deep learning based AMR models in the full public dataset RML2016.10a. In particular, for the case of a single signal-to-noise ratio signal set, the classification accuracy can be significantly improved, which verifies the effectiveness of the methods.

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arXiv2023

Deep Learning-Based Frequency Offset Estimation

In wireless communication systems, the asynchronization of the oscillators in the transmitter and the receiver along with the Doppler shift due to relative movement may lead to the presence of carrier frequency offset (CFO) in the received signals. Estimation of CFO is crucial for subsequent processing such as coherent demodulation. In this brief, we demonstrate the utilization of deep learning for CFO estimation by employing a residual network (ResNet) to learn and extract signal features from the raw in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components of the signals. We use multiple modulation schemes in the training set to make the trained model adaptable to multiple modulations or even new signals. In comparison to the commonly used traditional CFO estimation methods, our proposed IQ-ResNet method exhibits superior performance across various scenarios including different oversampling ratios, various signal lengths, and different channels

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arXiv2023

Augmenting Radio Signals with Wavelet Transform for Deep Learning-Based Modulation Recognition

The use of deep learning for radio modulation recognition has become prevalent in recent years. This approach automatically extracts high-dimensional features from large datasets, facilitating the accurate classification of modulation schemes. However, in real-world scenarios, it may not be feasible to gather sufficient training data in advance. Data augmentation is a method used to increase the diversity and quantity of training dataset and to reduce data sparsity and imbalance. In this paper, we propose data augmentation methods that involve replacing detail coefficients decomposed by discrete wavelet transform for reconstructing to generate new samples and expand the training set. Different generation methods are used to generate replacement sequences. Simulation results indicate that our proposed methods significantly outperform the other augmentation methods.

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arXiv2023

AIR: Threats of Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning-Based Information Recovery

A wireless communications system usually consists of a transmitter which transmits the information and a receiver which recovers the original information from the received distorted signal. Deep learning (DL) has been used to improve the performance of the receiver in complicated channel environments and state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance has been achieved. However, its robustness has not been investigated. In order to evaluate the robustness of DL-based information recovery models under adversarial circumstances, we investigate adversarial attacks on the SOTA DL-based information recovery model, i.e., DeepReceiver. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem with power and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) constraints. We design different adversarial attack methods according to the adversary's knowledge of DeepReceiver's model and/or testing samples. Extensive experiments show that the DeepReceiver is vulnerable to the designed attack methods in all of the considered scenarios. Even in the scenario of both model and test sample restricted, the adversary can attack the DeepReceiver and increase its bit error rate (BER) above 10%. It can also be found that the DeepReceiver is vulnerable to adversarial perturbations even with very low power and limited PAPR. These results suggest that defense measures should be taken to enhance the robustness of DeepReceiver.

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arXiv2021

SigNet: A Novel Deep Learning Framework for Radio Signal Classification

Deep learning methods achieve great success in many areas due to their powerful feature extraction capabilities and end-to-end training mechanism, and recently they are also introduced for radio signal modulation classification. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework called SigNet, where a signal-to-matrix (S2M) operator is adopted to convert the original signal into a square matrix first and is co-trained with a follow-up CNN architecture for classification. This model is further accelerated by integrating 1D convolution operators, leading to the upgraded model SigNet2.0. The simulations on two signal datasets show that both SigNet and SigNet2.0 outperform a number of well-known baselines. More interestingly, our proposed models behave extremely well in small-sample learning when only a small training dataset is provided. They can achieve a relatively high accuracy even when 1\% training data are kept, while other baseline models may lose their effectiveness much more quickly as the datasets get smaller. Such result suggests that SigNet/SigNet2.0 could be extremely useful in the situations where labeled signal data are difficult to obtain. The visualization of the output features of our models demonstrates that our model can well divide different modulation types of signals in the feature hyper-space.

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arXiv2021

Deep Transfer Clustering of Radio Signals

Modulation recognition is an important task in radio signal processing. Most of the current researches focus on supervised learning. However, in many real scenarios, it is difficult and cost to obtain the labels of signals. In this letter, we turn to the more challenging problem: can we cluster the modulation types just based on a large number of unlabeled radio signals? If this problem can be solved, we then can also recognize modulation types by manually labeling a very small number of samples. To answer this problem, we propose a deep transfer clustering (DTC) model. DTC naturally integrates feature learning and deep clustering, and further adopts a transfer learning mechanism to improve the feature extraction ability of an embedded convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The experiments validate that our DTC significantly outperforms a number of baselines, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in clustering radio signals for modulation recognition.

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arXiv2021

Adaptive Visibility Graph Neural Network and its Application in Modulation Classification

Our digital world is full of time series and graphs which capture the various aspects of many complex systems. Traditionally, there are respective methods in processing these two different types of data, e.g., Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Graph Neural Network (GNN), while in recent years, time series could be mapped to graphs by using the techniques such as Visibility Graph (VG), so that researchers can use graph algorithms to mine the knowledge in time series. Such mapping methods establish a bridge between time series and graphs, and have high potential to facilitate the analysis of various real-world time series. However, the VG method and its variants are just based on fixed rules and thus lack of flexibility, largely limiting their application in reality. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Visibility Graph (AVG) algorithm that can adaptively map time series into graphs, based on which we further establish an end-to-end classification framework AVGNet, by utilizing GNN model DiffPool as the classifier. We then adopt AVGNet for radio signal modulation classification which is an important task in the field of wireless communication. The simulations validate that AVGNet outperforms a series of advanced deep learning methods, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in this task.

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arXiv2021

CLPVG: Circular limited penetrable visibility graph as a new network model for time series

Visibility Graph (VG) transforms time series into graphs, facilitating signal processing by advanced graph data mining algorithms. In this paper, based on the classic Limited Penetrable Visibility Graph (LPVG) method, we propose a novel nonlinear mapping method named Circular Limited Penetrable Visibility Graph (CLPVG). The testing on degree distribution and clustering coefficient on the generated graphs of typical time series validates that our CLPVG is able to effectively capture the important features of time series and has better anti-noise ability than traditional LPVG. The experiments on real-world time-series datasets of radio signal and electroencephalogram (EEG) also suggest that the structural features provided by CLPVG, rather than LPVG, are more useful for time-series classification, leading to higher accuracy. And this classification performance can be further enhanced through structural feature expansion by adopting Subgraph Networks (SGN). All of these results validate the effectiveness of our CLPVG model.

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arXiv2020

DemodNet: Learning Soft Demodulation from Hard Information Using Convolutional Neural Network

Soft demodulation is a basic module of traditional communication receivers. It converts received symbols into soft bits, that is, log likelihood ratios (LLRs). However, in the nonideal additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, it is difficult to accurately calculate the LLR. In this letter, we propose a demodulator, DemodNet, based on a fully convolutional neural network with variable input and output length. We use hard bit information to train the DemodNet, and we propose log probability ratio (LPR) based on the output layer of the trained DemodNet to realize soft demodulation. The simulation results show that under the AWGN channel, the performance of both hard demodulation and soft demodulation of DemodNet is very close to the traditional methods. In three non-ideal channel scenarios, i.e., the presence of frequency deviation, additive generalized Gaussian noise (AGGN) channel, and Rayleigh fading channel, the performance of channel decoding using the soft information LPR obtained by DemodNet is better than the performance of decoding using the exact LLR calculated under the ideal AWGN assumption.

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arXiv2020

DeepReceiver: A Deep Learning-Based Intelligent Receiver for Wireless Communications in the Physical Layer

A canonical wireless communication system consists of a transmitter and a receiver. The information bit stream is transmitted after coding, modulation, and pulse shaping. Due to the effects of radio frequency (RF) impairments, channel fading, noise and interference, the signal arriving at the receiver will be distorted. The receiver needs to recover the original information from the distorted signal. In this paper, we propose a new receiver model, namely DeepReceiver, that uses a deep neural network to replace the traditional receiver's entire information recovery process. We design a one-dimensional convolution DenseNet (1D-Conv-DenseNet) structure, in which global pooling is used to improve the adaptability of the network to different input signal lengths. Multiple binary classifiers are used at the final classification layer to achieve multi-bit information stream recovery. We also exploit the DeepReceiver for unified blind reception of multiple modulation and coding schemes (MCSs) by including signal samples of corresponding MCSs in the training set. Simulation results show that the proposed DeepReceiver performs better than traditional step-by-step serial hard decision receiver in terms of bit error rate under the influence of various factors such as noise, RF impairments, multipath fading, cochannel interference, dynamic environment, and unified reception of multiple MCSs.

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arXiv2019

Spectrum Sensing Based on Deep Learning Classification for Cognitive Radios

Spectrum sensing is a key technology for cognitive radios. We present spectrum sensing as a classification problem and propose a sensing method based on deep learning classification. We normalize the received signal power to overcome the effects of noise power uncertainty. We train the model with as many types of signals as possible as well as noise data to enable the trained network model to adapt to untrained new signals. We also use transfer learning strategies to improve the performance for real-world signals. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of this method. The simulation results show that the proposed method performs better than two traditional spectrum sensing methods, i.e., maximum-minimum eigenvalue ratio-based method and frequency domain entropy-based method. In addition, the experimental results of the new untrained signal types show that our method can adapt to the detection of these new signals. Furthermore, the real-world signal detection experiment results show that the detection performance can be further improved by transfer learning. Finally, experiments under colored noise show that our proposed method has superior detection performance under colored noise, while the traditional methods have a significant performance degradation, which further validate the superiority of our method.

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arXiv2019

Deep Learning for Cooperative Radio Signal Classification

Radio signal classification has a very wide range of applications in cognitive radio networks and electromagnetic spectrum monitoring. In this article, we consider scenarios where multiple nodes in the network participate in cooperative classification. We propose cooperative radio signal classification methods based on deep learning for decision fusion, signal fusion and feature fusion, respectively. We analyze the performance of these methods through simulation experiments. We conclude the article with a discussion of research challenges and open problems.

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