BitSemCom: A Bit-Level Semantic Communication Framework with Learnable Probabilistic Mapping

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Haoshuo, Bo, Yufei, Mo, Jianhua, Tao, Meixia
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866912678218301440
author Zhang, Haoshuo
Bo, Yufei
Mo, Jianhua
Tao, Meixia
author_facet Zhang, Haoshuo
Bo, Yufei
Mo, Jianhua
Tao, Meixia
contents Most existing semantic communication systems employ analog modulation, which is incompatible with modern digital communication systems. Although several digital transmission approaches have been proposed to address this issue, an end-to-end bit-level method that is compatible with arbitrary modulation formats, robust to channel noise, and free from quantization errors remains lacking. To this end, we propose BitSemCom, a novel bit-level semantic communication framework that realizes true joint source-channel coding (JSCC) at the bit level. Specifically, we introduce a modular learnable bit mapper that establishes a probabilistic mapping between continuous semantic features and discrete bits, utilizing the Gumbel-Softmax trick to enable differentiable bit generation. Simulation results on image transmission demonstrate that BitSemCom achieves both competitive performance and superior robustness compared to traditional separate source-channel coding (SSCC) schemes, and outperforms deep learning based JSCC with uniform 1-bit quantization, validating the effectiveness of the learnable bit mapper. Despite these improvements, the bit mapper adds only 0.42% parameters and 0.09% computational complexity, making BitSemCom a lightweight and practical solution for real-world semantic communication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BitSemCom: A Bit-Level Semantic Communication Framework with Learnable Probabilistic Mapping
Zhang, Haoshuo
Bo, Yufei
Mo, Jianhua
Tao, Meixia
Image and Video Processing
Most existing semantic communication systems employ analog modulation, which is incompatible with modern digital communication systems. Although several digital transmission approaches have been proposed to address this issue, an end-to-end bit-level method that is compatible with arbitrary modulation formats, robust to channel noise, and free from quantization errors remains lacking. To this end, we propose BitSemCom, a novel bit-level semantic communication framework that realizes true joint source-channel coding (JSCC) at the bit level. Specifically, we introduce a modular learnable bit mapper that establishes a probabilistic mapping between continuous semantic features and discrete bits, utilizing the Gumbel-Softmax trick to enable differentiable bit generation. Simulation results on image transmission demonstrate that BitSemCom achieves both competitive performance and superior robustness compared to traditional separate source-channel coding (SSCC) schemes, and outperforms deep learning based JSCC with uniform 1-bit quantization, validating the effectiveness of the learnable bit mapper. Despite these improvements, the bit mapper adds only 0.42% parameters and 0.09% computational complexity, making BitSemCom a lightweight and practical solution for real-world semantic communication.
title BitSemCom: A Bit-Level Semantic Communication Framework with Learnable Probabilistic Mapping
topic Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26225