arXiv subjects

Xiaofeng Tao

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaofeng Tao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Sensing and Understanding the World over Air: A Large Multimodal Model for Mobile Networks

Large models (LMs), such as ChatGPT, have made a significant impact across diverse domains and hold great potential to facilitate the evolution of network intelligence. Wireless-native multi-modal large models (WMLMs) can sense and understand the physical world through multi-modal data, serving as a key enabler that integrates communication, sensing, and intelligence, and thus they can boost various smart services to billions of users. However, research on WMLMs remains in its infancy, and the construction of domain-specific multi-modal large models for wireless networks is still underexplored. In this paper, we outlines the key characteristics of WMLMs and summarizes existing methods, on the basis of which a wireless-native multimodal training paradigm is proposed. Specifically, we constructed a GPT-style WMLM model and trained it on a real-world large-scale dataset, leveraging wireless signals as an anchor modality for contrastive learning. Our approach demonstrates outstanding performance compared with existing small-scale models and large multi-modal models, validating the feasibility of using wireless signals as a universal modality and highlighting WMLM's potential to emerge as a new paradigm for future wireless networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

FourierCompress: Layer-Aware Spectral Activation Compression for Efficient and Accurate Collaborative LLM Inference

Collaborative large language model (LLM) inference enables real-time, privacy-preserving AI services on resource-constrained edge devices by partitioning computational workloads between client devices and edge servers. However, this paradigm is severely hindered by communication bottlenecks caused by the transmission of high-dimensional intermediate activations, exacerbated by the autoregressive decoding structure of LLMs, where bandwidth consumption scales linearly with output length. Existing activation compression methods struggle to simultaneously achieve high compression ratios, low reconstruction error, and computational efficiency. This paper proposes FourierCompress, a novel, layer-aware activation compression framework that exploits the frequency-domain sparsity of LLM activations. We rigorously demonstrate that activations from the first Transformer layer exhibit strong smoothness and energy concentration in the low-frequency domain, making them highly amenable to near-lossless compression via the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). FourierCompress transforms activations into the frequency domain, retains only a compact block of low-frequency coefficients, and reconstructs the signal at the server using conjugate symmetry, enabling seamless hardware acceleration on DSPs and FPGAs. Extensive experiments on Llama 3 and Qwen2.5 models across 10 commonsense reasoning datasets demonstrate that FourierCompress preserves performance remarkably close to the uncompressed baseline, outperforming Top-k, QR, and SVD. FourierCompress bridges the gap between communication efficiency (an average 7.6x reduction in activation size), near-lossless inference (less than 0.3% average accuracy loss), and significantly faster compression (achieving over 32x reduction in compression time compared to Top-k via hardware acceleration) for edge-device LLM inference.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Stacked Intelligent Metasurface for End-to-End OFDM System

Stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) and dual-polarized SIM (DPSIM) enabled wave-domain signal processing have emerged as promising research directions for offloading baseband digital processing tasks and efficiently simplifying transceiver design. However, existing architectures are limited to employing SIM (DPSIM) for a single communication function, such as precoding or combining. To further enhance the overall performance of SIM (DPSIM)-assisted systems and achieve end-to-end (E2E) joint optimization from the transmitted bitstream to the received bitstream, we propose an SIM (DPSIM)-assisted E2E orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, in which traditional communication tasks such as channel coding, modulation, precoding, combining, demodulation, and channel decoding are performed synchronously within the electromagnetic (EM) forward propagation. Furthermore, inspired by the idea of abstracting real metasurfaces as hidden layers of a neural network, we propose the EM neural network (EMNN) to enable the control of the E2E OFDM communication system. In addition, transfer learning is introduced into the model training, and a training and deployment framework for the EMNN is designed. Simulation results demonstrate that both SIM-assisted E2E OFDM systems and DPSIM-assisted E2E OFDM systems can achieve robust bitstream transmission under complex channel conditions. Our study highlights the application potential of EMNN and SIM (DPSIM)-assisted E2E OFDM systems in the design of next-generation transceivers.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Compositional LLM Reasoning with Structured Task Relations in Interactive Multimodal Communications

Interactive multimodal applications (IMAs), such as route planning in the Internet of Vehicles, enrich users' personalized experiences by integrating various forms of data over wireless networks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) utilize mixture-of-experts (MoE) mechanisms to empower multiple IMAs, with each LLM trained individually for a specific task that presents different business workflows. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on multiple LLMs for IMAs, this paper presents a novel paradigm that accomplishes various IMAs using a single compositional LLM over wireless networks. The two primary challenges include 1) guiding a single LLM to adapt to diverse IMA objectives and 2) ensuring the flexibility and efficiency of the LLM in resource-constrained mobile environments. To tackle the first challenge, we propose ContextLoRA, a novel method that guides an LLM to learn the rich structured context among IMAs by constructing a task dependency graph. We partition the learnable parameter matrix of neural layers for each IMA to facilitate LLM composition. Then, we develop a step-by-step fine-tuning procedure guided by task relations, including training, freezing, and masking phases. This allows the LLM to learn to reason among tasks for better adaptation, capturing the latent dependencies between tasks. For the second challenge, we introduce ContextGear, a scheduling strategy to optimize the training procedure of ContextLoRA, aiming to minimize computational and communication costs through a strategic grouping mechanism. Experiments on three benchmarks show the superiority of the proposed ContextLoRA and ContextGear. Furthermore, we prototype our proposed paradigm on a real-world wireless testbed, demonstrating its practical applicability for various IMAs. We will release our code to the community.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Adaptive Federated LoRA in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Independent Sampling

Federated LoRA has emerged as a promising technique for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on distributed devices by reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, existing approaches often inadequately overlook the theoretical and practical implications of system and data heterogeneity, thereby failing to optimize the overall training efficiency, particularly in terms of wall-clock time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive federated LoRA strategy with independent client sampling to minimize the convergence wall-clock time of federated fine-tuning under both computation and communication heterogeneity. We first derive a new convergence bound for federated LoRA with arbitrary and independent client sampling, notably without requiring the stringent bounded gradient assumption. Then, we introduce an adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme that accounts for heterogeneous client resources and system bandwidth constraints. Based on the derived theory, we formulate and solve a non-convex optimization problem to jointly determine the LoRA sketching ratios and sampling probabilities, aiming to minimize wall-clock convergence time. An efficient and low-complexity algorithm is developed to approximate the solution. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces wall-clock training time compared to state-of-the-art methods across various models and datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

On Performance of LoRa Fluid Antenna Systems

This paper advocates a fluid antenna system (FAS)-assisted long-range communication (LoRa-FAS) for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. \textcolor{blue}{In the proposed system, FAS provides spatial diversity gains for LoRa, eliminating the necessity for integrating multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies into the system. It consists of a traditional LoRa transmitter with a fixed-position antenna and a LoRa receiver employing the FAS (Rx-FAS). The pilot sequence overhead and placement for FAS are also considered. Specifically, we consider embedding pilot sequences within symbols to reduce the impact of pilot overhead on system throughput and the physical layer (PHY) frame structure, leveraging the fact that the pilot sequences do not convey source information and correlation detection at the LoRa receiver needs not be performed across the entire symbol. The achievable performance of LoRa-FAS is thoroughly analyzed under both coherent and non-coherent detection schemes.} We obtain new closed-form approximations for the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the FAS channel under the block-correlation model. Furthermore, the approximate SER, equivalently the bit error rate (BER), of the proposed LoRa-FAS is also derived in closed form. Simulation results indicate that substantial SER gains can be achieved by FAS within the LoRa framework, even with a limited size of FAS. In addition, our analytical results align well with Clarke's exact spatial correlation model. Finally, when utilizing the block-correlation model, we suggest that the correlation factor should be selected as the proportion of the eigenvalues of the exact correlation matrix greater than 1 for higher accuracy.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Agile Orchestration at Will: An Entire Smart Service-Based Security Architecture Towards 6G

The upcoming 6G will fundamentally reshape mobile networks beyond communications, unlocking a multitude of applications that were once considered unimaginable. Meanwhile, security and resilience are especially highlighted in the 6G design principles. However, safeguarding 6G networks will be quite challenging due to various known and unknown threats from highly heterogeneous networks and diversified security requirements of distinct use cases, calling for a comprehensive re-design of security architecture. This motivates us to propose ES3A (Entire Smart Service-based Security Architecture), a novel security architecture for 6G networks. Specifically, we first discuss six high-level principles of our ES3A that include hierarchy, flexibility, scalability, resilience, endogeny, and trust and privacy. With these goals in mind, we then introduce three guidelines from a deployment perspective, envisioning our ES3A that offers service-based security, end-to-end protection, and smart security automation for 6G networks. Our architecture consists of three layers and three domains. It relies on a two-stage orchestration mechanism to tailor smart security strategies for customized protection in high-dynamic 6G networks, thereby addressing the aforementioned challenges. Finally, we prototype the proposed ES3A on a real-world radio system based on Software-Defined Radio (SDR). Experiments show the effectiveness of our ES3A. We also provide a case to show the superiority of our architecture.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

MALSIGHT: Exploring Malicious Source Code and Benign Pseudocode for Iterative Binary Malware Summarization

Binary malware summarization aims to automatically generate human-readable descriptions of malware behaviors from executable files, facilitating tasks like malware cracking and detection. Previous methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise. However, they still face significant issues, including poor usability, inaccurate explanations,and incomplete summaries, primarily due to the obscure pseudocode structure and the lack of malware training summaries. Further, calling relationships between functions, which involve the rich interactions within a binary malware, remain largely underexplored. To this end, we propose MALSIGHT, a novel code summarization framework that can iteratively generate descriptions of binary malware by exploring malicious source code and benign pseudocode. Specifically, we construct the first malware summary dataset, MalS and MalP, using an LLM and manually refine this dataset with human effort. At the training stage, we tune our proposed MalT5, a novel LLM-based code model, on the MalS and benign pseudocode datasets. Then, at the test stage, we iteratively feed the pseudocode functions into MalT5 to obtain the summary. Such a procedure facilitates the understanding of pseudocode structure and captures the intricate interactions between functions, thereby benefiting summaries' usability, accuracy, and completeness. Additionally, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark, BLEURT-sum, to measure the quality of summaries. Experiments on three datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed MALSIGHT. Notably, our proposed MalT5, with only 0.77B parameters, delivers comparable performance to much larger Code-Llama.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

A Novel Indicator for Quantifying and Minimizing Information Utility Loss of Robot Teams

The timely exchange of information among robots within a team is vital, but it can be constrained by limited wireless capacity. The inability to deliver information promptly can result in estimation errors that impact collaborative efforts among robots. In this paper, we propose a new metric termed Loss of Information Utility (LoIU) to quantify the freshness and utility of information critical for cooperation. The metric enables robots to prioritize information transmissions within bandwidth constraints. We also propose the estimation of LoIU using belief distributions and accordingly optimize both transmission schedule and resource allocation strategy for device-to-device transmissions to minimize the time-average LoIU within a robot team. A semi-decentralized Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient framework is developed, where each robot functions as an actor responsible for scheduling transmissions among its collaborators while a central critic periodically evaluates and refines the actors in response to mobility and interference. Simulations validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating an enhancement of information freshness and utility by 98%, compared to alternative methods.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Convergence-Privacy-Fairness Trade-Off in Personalized Federated Learning

Personalized federated learning (PFL), e.g., the renowned Ditto, strikes a balance between personalization and generalization by conducting federated learning (FL) to guide personalized learning (PL). While FL is unaffected by personalized model training, in Ditto, PL depends on the outcome of the FL. However, the clients' concern about their privacy and consequent perturbation of their local models can affect the convergence and (performance) fairness of PL. This paper presents PFL, called DP-Ditto, which is a non-trivial extension of Ditto under the protection of differential privacy (DP), and analyzes the trade-off among its privacy guarantee, model convergence, and performance distribution fairness. We also analyze the convergence upper bound of the personalized models under DP-Ditto and derive the optimal number of global aggregations given a privacy budget. Further, we analyze the performance fairness of the personalized models, and reveal the feasibility of optimizing DP-Ditto jointly for convergence and fairness. Experiments validate our analysis and demonstrate that DP-Ditto can surpass the DP-perturbed versions of the state-of-the-art PFL models, such as FedAMP, pFedMe, APPLE, and FedALA, by over 32.71% in fairness and 9.66% in accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Convergence, Privacy and Fairness for Wireless Personalized Federated Learning: Quantization-Assisted Min-Max Fair Scheduling

Personalized federated learning (PFL) offers a solution to balancing personalization and generalization by conducting federated learning (FL) to guide personalized learning (PL). Little attention has been given to wireless PFL (WPFL), where privacy concerns arise. Performance fairness of PL models is another challenge resulting from communication bottlenecks in WPFL. This paper exploits quantization errors to enhance the privacy of WPFL and proposes a novel quantization-assisted Gaussian differential privacy (DP) mechanism. We analyze the convergence upper bounds of individual PL models by considering the impact of the mechanism (i.e., quantization errors and Gaussian DP noises) and imperfect communication channels on the FL of WPFL. By minimizing the maximum of the bounds, we design an optimal transmission scheduling strategy that yields min-max fairness for WPFL with OFDMA interfaces. This is achieved by revealing the nested structure of this problem to decouple it into subproblems solved sequentially for the client selection, channel allocation, and power control, and for the learning rates and PL-FL weighting coefficients. Experiments validate our analysis and demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms alternative scheduling strategies by 87.08%, 16.21%, and 38.37% in accuracy, the maximum test loss of participating clients, and fairness (Jain's index), respectively.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Two Is Better Than One: Rotations Scale LoRAs

Scaling Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) facilitates large language models (LLMs) to efficiently adapt to diverse tasks. However, traditional gating mechanisms that route inputs to the best experts may fundamentally hinder LLMs' scalability, leading to poor generalization and underfitting issues. We identify that the root cause lies in the restricted expressiveness of existing weighted-sum mechanisms, both within and outside the convex cone of LoRA representations. This motivates us to propose RadarGate, a novel geometrically inspired gating method that introduces rotational operations of LoRAs representations to boost the expressiveness and facilitate richer feature interactions among multiple LoRAs for scalable LLMs. Specifically, we first fuse each LoRA representation to other LoRAs using a learnable component and then feed the output to a rotation matrix. This matrix involves learnable parameters that define the relative angular relationship between LoRA representations. Such a simple yet effective mechanism provides an extra degree of freedom, facilitating the learning of cross-LoRA synergies and properly tracking the challenging poor generalization and underfitting issues as the number of LoRA grows. Extensive experiments on 6 public benchmarks across 21 tasks show the effectiveness of our RadarGate for scaling LoRAs. We also provide valuable insights, revealing that the rotations to each pair of representations are contrastive, encouraging closer alignment of semantically similar representations during geometrical transformation while pushing distance ones further apart. We will release our code to the community.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Broadband Terahertz Frequency Comb Based on Actively Mode Locked Resonant Tunneling Diode

The frequency combs characterized by their phase-coherent equidistant spectral modes and precise frequency scales of broadband spectrum, have made them an indispensable part of contemporary physics. A terahertz (THz) frequency comb is a key asset for THz technology applications in spectroscopy, metrology, communications, and sensing. However, the THz frequency comb technologies are comparatively underdeveloped compared to the optical frequency domain, primarily attributed to the deficiency of advanced THz generation components. In this paper, we innovatively demonstrate a compact THz frequency comb source based on a resonant tunneling diode (RTD) through active mode locking technique. By injecting a strong continuous-wave radio frequency (RF) signal via the bias line into a RTD oscillator integrated within a WR-5 hollow metallic waveguide package, we observe a broadband comb spectrum spanning from 140 to 325 GHz. The mode spacing is directly determined by the frequency of the injected RF signal, providing a wide tuning range of approximately 40 GHz. We also employ the proposed frequency comb source as the local oscillator in a coherent transmitter. In particular, this is the first all-electrical compact THz frequency comb source, and the transmission demonstration paves the way to next-generation communication.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2025

An LLM-based Self-Evolving Security Framework for 6G Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks

Recently emerged 6G space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs), which integrate satellites, aerial networks, and terrestrial communications, offer ubiquitous coverage for various mobile applications. However, the highly dynamic, open, and heterogeneous nature of SAGINs poses severe security issues. Forming a defense line of SAGINs suffers from two preliminary challenges: 1) accurately understanding massive unstructured multi-dimensional threat information to generate defense strategies against various malicious attacks, 2) rapidly adapting to potential unknown threats to yield more effective security strategies. To tackle the above two challenges, we propose a novel security framework for SAGINs based on Large Language Models (LLMs), which consists of two key ingredients LLM-6GNG and 6G-INST. Our proposed LLM-6GNG leverages refined chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and dynamic multi-agent mechanisms to analyze massive unstructured multi-dimensional threat data and generate comprehensive security strategies, thus addressing the first challenge. Our proposed 6G-INST relies on a novel self-evolving method to automatically update LLM-6GNG, enabling it to accommodate unknown threats under dynamic communication environments, thereby addressing the second challenge. Additionally, we prototype the proposed framework with ns-3, OpenAirInterface (OAI), and software-defined radio (SDR). Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. The results show that our framework produces highly accurate security strategies that remain robust against a variety of unknown attacks. We will release our code to contribute to the community.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

3D-IDS: Doubly Disentangled Dynamic Intrusion Detection

Network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS) monitors network traffic for malicious activities, forming the frontline defense against increasing attacks over information infrastructures. Although promising, our quantitative analysis shows that existing methods perform inconsistently in declaring various unknown attacks (e.g., 9% and 35% F1 respectively for two distinct unknown threats for an SVM-based method) or detecting diverse known attacks (e.g., 31% F1 for the Backdoor and 93% F1 for DDoS by a GCN-based state-of-the-art method), and reveals that the underlying cause is entangled distributions of flow features. This motivates us to propose 3D-IDS, a novel method that aims to tackle the above issues through two-step feature disentanglements and a dynamic graph diffusion scheme. Specifically, we first disentangle traffic features by a non-parameterized optimization based on mutual information, automatically differentiating tens and hundreds of complex features of various attacks. Such differentiated features will be fed into a memory model to generate representations, which are further disentangled to highlight the attack-specific features. Finally, we use a novel graph diffusion method that dynamically fuses the network topology for spatial-temporal aggregation in evolving data streams. By doing so, we can effectively identify various attacks in encrypted traffics, including unknown threats and known ones that are not easily detected. Experiments show the superiority of our 3D-IDS. We also demonstrate that our two-step feature disentanglements benefit the explainability of NIDS.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

High Gain and Broadband Metalens Antenna for Terahertz Communication

Terahertz (THz) metalens antennas with compact planar structures have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing gain and aperture efficiency through beam convergence. However, research on THz wireless communication systems utilizing metalens antennas remains limited, primarily due to insufficient collaborative enhancement in gain and bandwidth in THz transceiver design. In this paper, we propose a high gain metalens antenna transceiver and demonstrate its application for THz communication. The system employs a horn antenna integrated with a 3D-printed bracket to enhance the metalens gain and operating bandwidth, where the metalens adopts a "sandwich" architecture composed of a V-shaped copper resonator, a dielectric substrate, and a grating. The resonant design inside the metalens facilitates high polarization conversion efficiency and full phase modulation across a 0° to 360° range at frequency between 0.20 to 0.30 THz band. Experimental results demonstrate a peak gain of 36.1 dBi and aperture efficiency of 54.45% at 0.244 THz, with a 3 dB bandwidth exceeding 33 GHz. A prototype communication system incorporating the metalens transceiver achieves a bit error rate (BER) reduction by three orders of magnitude compared to conventional horn antennas and supports a maximum data rate of 100 Gbps. This proposed metalens offer a high-gain, compact solution for achieving high data rate THz communications, driving advancements in 6G communication network.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Gaussian Process Classification-based Physical-Layer Authentication with Configurable Fingerprints for 6G-Enabled IoT

The future 6G-enabled IoT will facilitate seamless global connectivity among ubiquitous wireless devices, but this advancement also introduces heightened security risks such as spoofing attacks. Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) has emerged as a promising, inherently secure, and energy-efficient technique for authenticating IoT terminals. Nonetheless, the direct application of state-of-the-art PLA schemes to 6G-enabled IoT encounters two major hurdles: inaccurate channel fingerprints and the inefficient utilization of prior fingerprint information. To tackle these challenges, we leverage Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) to enhance fingerprint accuracy. Additionally, we integrate active learning and Gaussian Processes (GPs) to propose an Efficient Gaussian Process Classification (EGPC)-based PLA scheme, aiming for reliable and lightweight authentication. Following Bayes' theorem, we model configurable fingerprints using GPs and employ the expectation propagation method to identify unknown fingerprints. Given the difficulty of obtaining sufficient labeled fingerprint samples to train PLA models, we propose three fingerprint selection algorithms. These algorithms select unlabeled fingerprints and query their identities using upper-layer authentication mechanisms. Among these methods, the optimal algorithm reduces the number of training fingerprints needed through importance sampling and eliminates the requirement for PLA model retraining through joint distribution calculation. Simulations results reveal that, in comparison with non-RIS-based approaches, the RIS-aided PLA framework decreases the authentication error rate by 98.69%. In addition, our designed fingerprint selection algorithms achieve a reduction in the authentication error rate of up to 86.93% compared to baseline active learning schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

A Survey of Secure Semantic Communications

Semantic communication (SemCom) is regarded as a promising and revolutionary technology in 6G, aiming to transcend the constraints of ``Shannon's trap" by filtering out redundant information and extracting the core of effective data. Compared to traditional communication paradigms, SemCom offers several notable advantages, such as reducing the burden on data transmission, enhancing network management efficiency, and optimizing resource allocation. Numerous researchers have extensively explored SemCom from various perspectives, including network architecture, theoretical analysis, potential technologies, and future applications. However, as SemCom continues to evolve, a multitude of security and privacy concerns have arisen, posing threats to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of SemCom systems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the technologies that can be utilized to secure SemCom. Firstly, we elaborate on the entire life cycle of SemCom, which includes the model training, model transfer, and semantic information transmission phases. Then, we identify the security and privacy issues that emerge during these three stages. Furthermore, we summarize the techniques available to mitigate these security and privacy threats, including data cleaning, robust learning, defensive strategies against backdoor attacks, adversarial training, differential privacy, cryptography, blockchain technology, model compression, and physical-layer security. Lastly, this paper outlines future research directions to guide researchers in related fields.

cs.CR↗