arXiv subjects

Tony Xiao Han

Publications and source records attributed to Tony Xiao Han.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RFCheck: Synthetic RF Sensing Data Can Fail Measurement Consistency

Synthetic radio-frequency (RF) sensing data are widely used to augment wireless sensing tasks, yet their measurement consistency with real data is rarely evaluated under matched acquisition conditions. This paper identifies a measurement-consistency failure mode: synthetic samples may pass task-facing checks while deviating from the measurement behavior of real samples collected and processed by the same sensing pipeline, potentially introducing synthetic shortcuts and biasing downstream model selection. We propose RFCheck, a calibrated measurement audit that uses held-out real data from the same acquisition and preprocessing pipeline as the reference. RFCheck calibrates representation-specific tests on real samples and flags synthetic samples whose responses exceed the calibrated real-data range. We use the audit for candidate screening and residual repair. We validate RFCheck primarily on Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI), where the audit examines delay-domain and local frequency-domain structures. Experiments show that aggregate statistics and label-based screening can miss measurement failures detected by RFCheck. Under the same label acceptance rule, low-risk and high-risk synthetic candidates exhibit different downstream behavior. A repair reference reduces the flagged ratio to 10.83% while preserving mean task performance. In a held-out proposal study, correction followed by calibrated selection produces a class-balanced set with no flagged samples under a fixed training budget. We further apply the same calibration principle to frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave radar gesture sensing. The results show that synthetic RF sensing data can violate measurement consistency even when conventional task checks are satisfied, motivating measurement-aware diagnosis and mitigation before augmentation.

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arXiv2026

A Survey on Wi-Fi Sensing Generalizability: Taxonomy, Techniques, Datasets, and Future Research Prospects

Wi-Fi sensing has emerged as a powerful non-intrusive technology for recognizing human activities, monitoring vital signs, and enabling context-aware applications using commercial wireless devices. However, the performance of Wi-Fi sensing often degrades when applied to new users, devices, or environments due to significant domain shifts. To address this challenge, researchers have proposed a wide range of generalization techniques aimed at enhancing the robustness and adaptability of Wi-Fi sensing systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and structured review of over 200 papers published since 2015, categorizing them according to the Wi-Fi sensing pipeline: experimental setup, signal preprocessing, feature learning, and model deployment. We analyze key techniques, including signal preprocessing, domain adaptation, meta-learning, metric learning, data augmentation, cross-modal alignment, federated learning, and continual learning. Furthermore, we summarize publicly available datasets across various tasks, such as activity recognition, user identification, indoor localization, and pose estimation, and provide insights into their domain diversity. We also discuss emerging trends and future directions, including large-scale pretraining, integration with multimodal foundation models, and continual deployment. To foster community collaboration, we introduce the Sensing Dataset Platform (SDP) for sharing datasets and models. This survey aims to serve as a valuable reference and practical guide for researchers and practitioners dedicated to improving the generalizability of Wi-Fi sensing systems. Survey papge: https://github.com/aiotgroup/awesome-wireless-sensing-generalization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

On Discrete Ambiguity Functions of Random Communication Waveforms

This paper provides a fundamental characterization of the discrete ambiguity functions (AFs) of random communication waveforms under arbitrary orthonormal modulation with random constellation symbols, which serve as a key metric for evaluating the delay-Doppler sensing performance in future ISAC applications. A unified analytical framework is developed for two types of AFs, namely the discrete periodic AF (DP-AF) and the fast-slow time AF (FST-AF), where the latter may be seen as a small-Doppler approximation of the DP-AF. By analyzing the expectation of squared AFs, we derive exact closed-form expressions for both the expected sidelobe level (ESL) and the expected integrated sidelobe level (EISL) under the DP-AF and FST-AF formulations. For the DP-AF, we prove that the normalized EISL is identical for all orthogonal waveforms. To gain structural insights, we introduce a matrix representation based on the finite Weyl-Heisenberg (WH) group, where each delay-Doppler shift corresponds to a WH operator acting on the ISAC signal. This WH-group viewpoint yields sharp geometric constraints on the lowest sidelobes: The minimum ESL can only occur along a one-dimensional cut or over a set of widely dispersed delay-Doppler bins. Consequently, no waveform can attain the minimum ESL over any compact two-dimensional region, leading to a no-optimality (no-go) result under the DP-AF framework. For the FST-AF, the closed-form ESL and EISL expressions reveal a constellation-dependent regime governed by its kurtosis: The OFDM modulation achieves the minimum ESL for sub-Gaussian constellations, whereas the OTFS waveform becomes optimal for super-Gaussian constellations. Finally, four representative waveforms, namely, SC, OFDM, OTFS, and AFDM, are examined under both frameworks, and all theoretical results are verified through numerical examples.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

SDP: A Unified Protocol and Benchmarking Framework for Reproducible Wireless Sensing

Learning-based wireless sensing has made rapid progress, yet the field still lacks a unified and reproducible experimental foundation. Unlike computer vision, wireless sensing relies on hardware-dependent channel measurements whose representations, preprocessing pipelines, and evaluation protocols vary significantly across devices and datasets, hindering fair comparison and reproducibility. This paper proposes the Sensing Data Protocol (SDP), a protocol-level abstraction and unified benchmark for scalable wireless sensing. SDP acts as a standardization layer that decouples learning tasks from hardware heterogeneity. To this end, SDP enforces deterministic physical-layer sanitization, canonical tensor construction, and standardized training and evaluation procedures, decoupling learning performance from hardware-specific artifacts. Rather than introducing task-specific models, SDP establishes a principled protocol foundation for fair evaluation across diverse sensing tasks and platforms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDP achieves competitive accuracy while substantially improving stability, reducing inter-seed performance variance by orders of magnitude on complex activity recognition tasks. A real-world experiment using commercial off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware further illustrating the protocol's interoperability across heterogeneous hardware. By providing a unified protocol and benchmark, SDP enables reproducible and comparable wireless sensing research and supports the transition from ad hoc experimentation toward reliable engineering practice.

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arXiv2025

A Sensing Dataset Protocol for Benchmarking and Multi-Task Wireless Sensing

Wireless sensing has become a fundamental enabler for intelligent environments, supporting applications such as human detection, activity recognition, localization, and vital sign monitoring. Despite rapid advances, existing datasets and pipelines remain fragmented across sensing modalities, hindering fair comparison, transfer, and reproducibility. We propose the Sensing Dataset Protocol (SDP), a protocol-level specification and benchmark framework for large-scale wireless sensing. SDP defines how heterogeneous wireless signals are mapped into a unified perception data-block schema through lightweight synchronization, frequency-time alignment, and resampling, while a Canonical Polyadic-Alternating Least Squares (CP-ALS) pooling stage provides a task-agnostic representation that preserves multipath, spectral, and temporal structures. Built upon this protocol, a unified benchmark is established for detection, recognition, and vital-sign estimation with consistent preprocessing, training, and evaluation. Experiments under the cross-user split demonstrate that SDP significantly reduces variance (approximately 88%) across seeds while maintaining competitive accuracy and latency, confirming its value as a reproducible foundation for multi-modal and multitask sensing research.

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arXiv2025

Generative AI Meets Wireless Sensing: Towards Wireless Foundation Model

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has made significant advancements in fields such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating its capability to synthesize high-fidelity data and improve generalization. Recently, there has been growing interest in integrating GenAI into wireless sensing systems. By leveraging generative techniques such as data augmentation, domain adaptation, and denoising, wireless sensing applications, including device localization, human activity recognition, and environmental monitoring, can be significantly improved. This survey investigates the convergence of GenAI and wireless sensing from two complementary perspectives. First, we explore how GenAI can be integrated into wireless sensing pipelines, focusing on two modes of integration: as a plugin to augment task-specific models and as a solver to directly address sensing tasks. Second, we analyze the characteristics of mainstream generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and diffusion models, and discuss their applicability and unique advantages across various wireless sensing tasks. We further identify key challenges in applying GenAI to wireless sensing and outline a future direction toward a wireless foundation model: a unified, pre-trained design capable of scalable, adaptable, and efficient signal understanding across diverse sensing tasks.

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arXiv2025

Sensing-Assisted Channel Prediction in Complex Wireless Environments: An LLM-Based Approach

This letter studies the sensing-assisted channel prediction for a multi-antenna orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system operating in realistic and complex wireless environments. In this system,an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) transmitter leverages the mono-static sensing capability to facilitate the prediction of its bi-static communication channel, by exploiting the fact that the sensing and communication channels share the same physical environment involving shared scatterers. Specifically, we propose a novel large language model (LLM)-based channel prediction approach,which adapts pre-trained text-based LLM to handle the complex-matrix-form channel state information (CSI) data. This approach utilizes the LLM's strong ability to capture the intricate spatiotemporal relationships between the multi-path sensing and communication channels, and thus efficiently predicts upcoming communication CSI based on historical communication and sensing CSI data. Experimental results show that the proposed LLM-based approach significantly outperforms conventional deep learning-based methods and the benchmark scheme without sensing assistance.

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arXiv2025

Talk is Not Always Cheap: Promoting Wireless Sensing Models with Text Prompts

Wireless signal-based human sensing technologies, such as WiFi, millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), enable the detection and interpretation of human presence, posture, and activities, thereby providing critical support for applications in public security, healthcare, and smart environments. These technologies exhibit notable advantages due to their non-contact operation and environmental adaptability; however, existing systems often fail to leverage the textual information inherent in datasets. To address this, we propose an innovative text-enhanced wireless sensing framework, WiTalk, that seamlessly integrates semantic knowledge through three hierarchical prompt strategies-label-only, brief description, and detailed action description-without requiring architectural modifications or incurring additional data costs. We rigorously validate this framework across three public benchmark datasets: XRF55 for human action recognition (HAR), and WiFiTAL and XRFV2 for WiFi temporal action localization (TAL). Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements: on XRF55, accuracy for WiFi, RFID, and mmWave increases by 3.9%, 2.59%, and 0.46%, respectively; on WiFiTAL, the average performance of WiFiTAD improves by 4.98%; and on XRFV2, the mean average precision gains across various methods range from 4.02% to 13.68%. Our codes have been included in https://github.com/yangzhenkui/WiTalk.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Sensing With Communication Signals: From Information Theory to Signal Processing

The Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) paradigm is anticipated to be a cornerstone of the upcoming 6G networks. In order to optimize the use of wireless resources, 6G ISAC systems need to harness the communication data payload signals, which are inherently random, for both sensing and communication (S&C) purposes. This tutorial paper provides a comprehensive technical overview of the fundamental theory and signal processing methodologies for ISAC transmission with random communication signals. We begin by introducing the deterministic-random tradeoff (DRT) between S&C from an information-theoretic perspective, emphasizing the need for specialized signal processing techniques tailored to random ISAC signals. Building on this foundation, we review the core signal models and processing pipelines for communication-centric ISAC systems, and analyze the average squared auto-correlation function (ACF) of random ISAC signals, which serves as a fundamental performance metric for multi-target ranging tasks. Drawing insights from these theoretical results, we outline the design principles for the three key components of communication-centric ISAC systems: modulation schemes, constellation design, and pulse shaping filters. The goal is to either enhance sensing performance without compromising communication efficiency or to establish a scalable tradeoff between the two. We then extend our analysis from a single-antenna ISAC system to its multi-antenna counterpart, discussing recent advancements in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) precoding techniques specifically designed for random ISAC signals. We conclude by highlighting several open challenges and future research directions in the field of sensing with communication signals.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

RayLoc: Wireless Indoor Localization via Fully Differentiable Ray-tracing

Wireless indoor localization has been a pivotal area of research over the last two decades, becoming a cornerstone for numerous sensing applications. However, conventional wireless localization methods rely on channel state information to perform blind modelling and estimation of a limited set of localization parameters. This oversimplification neglects many sensing scene details, resulting in suboptimal localization accuracy. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel approach to wireless indoor localization by reformulating it as an inverse problem of wireless ray-tracing, inferring scene parameters that generates the measured CSI. At the core of our solution is a fully differentiable ray-tracing simulator that enables backpropagation to comprehensive parameters of the sensing scene, allowing for precise localization. To establish a robust localization context, RayLoc constructs a high-fidelity sensing scene by refining coarse-grained background model. Furthermore, RayLoc overcomes the challenges of sparse gradient and local minima by convolving the signal generation process with a Gaussian kernel. Extensive experiments showcase that RayLoc outperforms traditional localization baselines and is able to generalize to different sensing environments.

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arXiv2024

An Experimental Study of Passive UAV Tracking with Digital Arrays and Cellular Downlink Signals

Given the prospects of the low-altitude economy (LAE) and the popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), there are increasing demands on monitoring flying objects at low altitude in wide urban areas. In this work, the widely deployed long-term evolution (LTE) base station (BS) is exploited to illuminate UAVs in bistatic trajectory tracking. Specifically, a passive sensing receiver with two digital antenna arrays is proposed and developed to capture both the line-of-sight (LoS) signal and the scattered signal off a target UAV. From their cross ambiguity function, the bistatic range, Doppler shift and angle-of-arrival (AoA) of the target UAV can be detected in a sequence of time slots. In order to address missed detections and false alarms of passive sensing, a multi-target tracking framework is adopted to track the trajectory of the target UAV. It is demonstrated by experiments that the proposed UAV tracking system can achieve a meter-level accuracy.

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arXiv2024

CCS: Continuous Learning for Customized Incremental Wireless Sensing Services

Wireless sensing has made significant progress in tasks ranging from action recognition, vital sign estimation, pose estimation, etc. After over a decade of work, wireless sensing currently stands at the tipping point transitioning from proof-of-concept systems to the large-scale deployment. We envision a future service scenario where wireless sensing service providers distribute sensing models to users. During usage, users might request new sensing capabilities. For example, if someone is away from home on a business trip or vacation for an extended period, they may want a new sensing capability that can detect falls in elderly parents or grandparents and promptly alert them. In this paper, we propose CCS (continuous customized service), enabling model updates on users' local computing resources without data transmission to the service providers. To address the issue of catastrophic forgetting in model updates where updating model parameters to implement new capabilities leads to the loss of existing capabilities we design knowledge distillation and weight alignment modules. These modules enable the sensing model to acquire new capabilities while retaining the existing ones. We conducted extensive experiments on the large-scale XRF55 dataset across Wi-Fi, millimeter-wave radar, and RFID modalities to simulate scenarios where four users sequentially introduced new customized demands. The results affirm that CCS excels in continuous model services across all the above wireless modalities, significantly outperforming existing approaches like OneFi.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

RF-Diffusion: Radio Signal Generation via Time-Frequency Diffusion

Along with AIGC shines in CV and NLP, its potential in the wireless domain has also emerged in recent years. Yet, existing RF-oriented generative solutions are ill-suited for generating high-quality, time-series RF data due to limited representation capabilities. In this work, inspired by the stellar achievements of the diffusion model in CV and NLP, we adapt it to the RF domain and propose RF-Diffusion. To accommodate the unique characteristics of RF signals, we first introduce a novel Time-Frequency Diffusion theory to enhance the original diffusion model, enabling it to tap into the information within the time, frequency, and complex-valued domains of RF signals. On this basis, we propose a Hierarchical Diffusion Transformer to translate the theory into a practical generative DNN through elaborated design spanning network architecture, functional block, and complex-valued operator, making RF-Diffusion a versatile solution to generate diverse, high-quality, and time-series RF data. Performance comparison with three prevalent generative models demonstrates the RF-Diffusion's superior performance in synthesizing Wi-Fi and FMCW signals. We also showcase the versatility of RF-Diffusion in boosting Wi-Fi sensing systems and performing channel estimation in 5G networks.

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arXiv2024

Design and Optimization of Cooperative Sensing With Limited Backhaul Capacity

This paper introduces a cooperative sensing framework designed for integrated sensing and communication cellular networks. The framework comprises one base station (BS) functioning as the sensing transmitter, while several nearby BSs act as sensing receivers. The primary objective is to facilitate cooperative target localization by enabling each receiver to share specific information with a fusion center (FC) over a limited capacity backhaul link. To achieve this goal, we propose an advanced cooperative sensing design that enhances the communication process between the receivers and the FC. Each receiver independently estimates the time delay and the reflecting coefficient associated with the reflected path from the target. Subsequently, each receiver transmits the estimated values and the received signal samples centered around the estimated time delay to the FC. To efficiently quantize the signal samples, a Karhunen-Loève Transform coding scheme is employed. Furthermore, an optimization problem is formulated to allocate backhaul resources for quantizing different samples, improving target localization. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed advanced design and demonstrate its superiority over a baseline design, where only the locally estimated values are transmitted from each receiver to the FC.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Reshaping the ISAC Tradeoff Under OFDM Signaling: A Probabilistic Constellation Shaping Approach

Integrated sensing and communications is regarded as a key enabling technology in the sixth generation networks, where a unified waveform, such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal, is adopted to facilitate both sensing and communications (S&C). However, the random communication data embedded in the OFDM signal results in severe variability in the sidelobes of its ambiguity function (AF), which leads to missed detection of weak targets and false detection of ghost targets, thereby impairing the sensing performance. Therefore, balancing between preserving communication capability (i.e., the randomness) while improving sensing performance remains a challenging task. To cope with this issue, we characterize the random AF of OFDM communication signals, and demonstrate that the AF variance is determined by the fourth-moment of the constellation amplitudes. Subsequently, we propose an optimal probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) approach by maximizing the achievable information rate (AIR) under the fourth-moment, power and probability constraints, where the optimal input distribution may be numerically specified through a modified Blahut-Arimoto algorithm. To reduce the computational overheads, we further propose a heuristic PCS approach by actively controlling the value of the fourth-moment, without involving the communication metric in the optimization model, despite that the AIR is passively scaled with the variation of the input distribution. Numerical results show that both approaches strike a scalable performance tradeoff between S&C, where the superiority of the PCS-enabled constellations over conventional uniform constellations is also verified. Notably, the heuristic approach achieves very close performance to the optimal counterpart, at a much lower computational complexity.

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arXiv2023

Fully-Passive versus Semi-Passive IRS-Enabled Sensing: SNR and CRB Comparison

This paper investigates the sensing performance of two intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-enabled non-line-of-sight (NLoS) sensing systems with fully-passive and semi-passive IRSs, respectively. In particular, we consider a fundamental setup with one base station (BS), one uniform linear array (ULA) IRS, and one point target in the NLoS region of the BS. Accordingly, we analyze the sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance for a target detection scenario and the estimation Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) performance for a target's direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation scenario, in cases where the transmit beamforming at the BS and the reflective beamforming at the IRS are jointly optimized. First, for the target detection scenario, we characterize the maximum sensing SNR when the BS-IRS channels are line-of-sight (LoS) and Rayleigh fading, respectively. It is revealed that when the number of reflecting elements $N$ equipped at the IRS becomes sufficiently large, the maximum sensing SNR increases proportionally to $N^2$ for the semi-passive-IRS sensing system, but proportionally to $N^4$ for the fully-passive-IRS counterpart. Then, for the target's DoA estimation scenario, we analyze the minimum CRB performance when the BS-IRS channel follows Rayleigh fading. Specifically, when $N$ grows, the minimum CRB decreases inversely proportionally to $N^4$ and $N^6$ for the semi-passive and fully-passive-IRS sensing systems, respectively. Finally, numerical results are presented to corroborate our analysis across various transmit and reflective beamforming design schemes under general channel setups. It is shown that the fully-passive-IRS sensing system outperforms the semi-passive counterpart when $N$ exceeds a certain threshold. This advantage is attributed to the additional reflective beamforming gain in the IRS-BS path, which efficiently compensates for the path loss for a large $N$.

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arXiv2023

Probabilistic Constellation Shaping for OFDM-Based ISAC Signaling

Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) has garnered significant attention as a promising technology for the upcoming sixth-generation wireless communication systems (6G). In pursuit of this goal, a common strategy is that a unified waveform, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), should serve dual-functional roles by enabling simultaneous sensing and communications (S&C) operations. However, the sensing performance of an OFDM communication signal is substantially affected by the randomness of the data symbols mapped from bit streams. Therefore, achieving a balance between preserving communication capability (i.e., the randomness) while improving sensing performance remains a challenging task. To cope with this issue, in this paper we analyze the ambiguity function of the OFDM communication signal modulated by random data. Subsequently, a probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) method is proposed to devise the probability distributions of constellation points, which is able to strike a scalable S&C tradeoff of the random transmitted signal. Finally, the superiority of the proposed PCS method over conventional uniformly distributed constellations is validated through numerical simulations.

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arXiv2023

An Overview on IEEE 802.11bf: WLAN Sensing

With recent advancements, the wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology has been successfully utilized to realize sensing functionalities such as detection, localization, and recognition. However, the WLANs standards are developed mainly for the purpose of communication, and thus may not be able to meet the stringent requirements for emerging sensing applications. To resolve this issue, a new Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11bf, has been established by the IEEE 802.11 working group, with the objective of creating a new amendment to the WLAN standard to meet advanced sensing requirements while minimizing the effect on communications. This paper provides a comprehensive overview on the up-to-date efforts in the IEEE 802.11bf TG. First, we introduce the definition of the 802.11bf amendment and its formation and standardization timeline. Next, we discuss the WLAN sensing use cases with the corresponding key performance indicator (KPI) requirements. After reviewing previous WLAN sensing research based on communication-oriented WLAN standards, we identify their limitations and underscore the practical need for the new sensing-oriented amendment in 802.11bf. Furthermore, we discuss the WLAN sensing framework and procedure used for measurement acquisition, by considering both sensing at sub-7GHz and directional multi-gigabit (DMG) sensing at 60 GHz, respectively, and address their shared features, similarities, and differences. In addition, we present various candidate technical features for IEEE 802.11bf, including waveform/sequence design, feedback types, as well as quantization and compression techniques. We also describe the methodologies and the channel modeling used by the IEEE 802.11bf TG for evaluation. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future research directions to motivate more research endeavors towards this field in details.

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