PIKAN: Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Explainable UAV Channel Modelling

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Tekbıyık, Kürşat, Kurt, Güneş Karabulut, Lesage-Landry, Antoine
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908745902063616
author Tekbıyık, Kürşat
Kurt, Güneş Karabulut
Lesage-Landry, Antoine
author_facet Tekbıyık, Kürşat
Kurt, Güneş Karabulut
Lesage-Landry, Antoine
contents Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications demand accurate yet interpretable air-to-ground (A2G) channel models that can adapt to nonstationary propagation environments. While deterministic models offer interpretability and deep learning (DL) models provide accuracy, both approaches suffer from either rigidity or a lack of explainability. To bridge this gap, we propose the Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (PIKAN) that embeds physical principles (e.g., free-space path loss, two-ray reflections) into the learning process. Unlike physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), PIKAN is more flexible for applying physical information because it introduces them as flexible inductive biases. Thus, it enables a more flexible training process. Experiments on UAV A2G measurement data show that PIKAN achieves comparable accuracy to DL models while providing symbolic and explainable expressions aligned with propagation laws. Remarkably, PIKAN achieves this performance with only 232 parameters, making it up to 37 times lighter than multilayer perceptron (MLP) baselines with thousands of parameters, without sacrificing correlation with measurements and also providing symbolic expressions. These results highlight PIKAN as an efficient, interpretable, and scalable solution for UAV channel modelling in beyond-5G and 6G networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06355
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PIKAN: Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Explainable UAV Channel Modelling
Tekbıyık, Kürşat
Kurt, Güneş Karabulut
Lesage-Landry, Antoine
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications demand accurate yet interpretable air-to-ground (A2G) channel models that can adapt to nonstationary propagation environments. While deterministic models offer interpretability and deep learning (DL) models provide accuracy, both approaches suffer from either rigidity or a lack of explainability. To bridge this gap, we propose the Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (PIKAN) that embeds physical principles (e.g., free-space path loss, two-ray reflections) into the learning process. Unlike physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), PIKAN is more flexible for applying physical information because it introduces them as flexible inductive biases. Thus, it enables a more flexible training process. Experiments on UAV A2G measurement data show that PIKAN achieves comparable accuracy to DL models while providing symbolic and explainable expressions aligned with propagation laws. Remarkably, PIKAN achieves this performance with only 232 parameters, making it up to 37 times lighter than multilayer perceptron (MLP) baselines with thousands of parameters, without sacrificing correlation with measurements and also providing symbolic expressions. These results highlight PIKAN as an efficient, interpretable, and scalable solution for UAV channel modelling in beyond-5G and 6G networks.
title PIKAN: Physics-Inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Explainable UAV Channel Modelling
topic Machine Learning
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06355