Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Yi-Qun, Ma, Zhi-Ming, Li, Geoffrey Ye, Yuan, Shuai, Ye, Tong, Zhou, Chuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10061
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911151281930240
author Zhao, Yi-Qun
Ma, Zhi-Ming
Li, Geoffrey Ye
Yuan, Shuai
Ye, Tong
Zhou, Chuan
author_facet Zhao, Yi-Qun
Ma, Zhi-Ming
Li, Geoffrey Ye
Yuan, Shuai
Ye, Tong
Zhou, Chuan
contents Artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new era for communication. As a result, the establishment of a semantic communication framework is putting on the agenda. Based on a realistic semantic communication model, this paper develops a rate-distortion framework for semantic compression. Different from the existing works primarily focusing on decoder-side estimation of intrinsic meaning and ignoring its inherent issues, such as ambiguity and polysemy, we exploit a constraint of conditional semantic probability distortion to effectively capture the essential features of practical semantic exchanges in an AI-assisted communication system. With the help of the methods in rate-distortion-perception theory, we establish a theorem specifying the minimum achievable rate under this semantic constraint and a traditional symbolic constraint and obtain its closed-form limit for a particular semantic scenario. From the experiments in this paper, bounding conditional semantic probability distortion can effectively improve both semantic transmission accuracy and bit-rate efficiency. Our framework bridges information theory and AI, enabling potential applications in bandwidth-efficient semantic-aware networks, enhanced transceiver understanding, and optimized semantic transmission for AI-driven systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_10061
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semantic Rate-Distortion Theory with Applications
Zhao, Yi-Qun
Ma, Zhi-Ming
Li, Geoffrey Ye
Yuan, Shuai
Ye, Tong
Zhou, Chuan
Information Theory
Signal Processing
Artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new era for communication. As a result, the establishment of a semantic communication framework is putting on the agenda. Based on a realistic semantic communication model, this paper develops a rate-distortion framework for semantic compression. Different from the existing works primarily focusing on decoder-side estimation of intrinsic meaning and ignoring its inherent issues, such as ambiguity and polysemy, we exploit a constraint of conditional semantic probability distortion to effectively capture the essential features of practical semantic exchanges in an AI-assisted communication system. With the help of the methods in rate-distortion-perception theory, we establish a theorem specifying the minimum achievable rate under this semantic constraint and a traditional symbolic constraint and obtain its closed-form limit for a particular semantic scenario. From the experiments in this paper, bounding conditional semantic probability distortion can effectively improve both semantic transmission accuracy and bit-rate efficiency. Our framework bridges information theory and AI, enabling potential applications in bandwidth-efficient semantic-aware networks, enhanced transceiver understanding, and optimized semantic transmission for AI-driven systems.
title Semantic Rate-Distortion Theory with Applications
topic Information Theory
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10061