Masked Symbol Modeling for Demodulation of Oversampled Baseband Communication Signals in Impulsive Noise-Dominated Channels

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bedir, Oguz, Sevim, Nurullah, Ibrahim, Mostafa, Ekin, Sabit
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bedir, Oguz
Sevim, Nurullah
Ibrahim, Mostafa
Ekin, Sabit
author_facet Bedir, Oguz
Sevim, Nurullah
Ibrahim, Mostafa
Ekin, Sabit
contents Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing show that attention mechanism in Transformer networks, trained via masked-token prediction, enables models to capture the semantic context of the tokens and internalize the grammar of language. While the application of Transformers to communication systems is a burgeoning field, the notion of context within physical waveforms remains under-explored. This paper addresses that gap by re-examining inter-symbol contribution (ISC) caused by pulse-shaping overlap. Rather than treating ISC as a nuisance, we view it as a deterministic source of contextual information embedded in oversampled complex baseband signals. We propose Masked Symbol Modeling (MSM), a framework for the physical (PHY) layer inspired by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers methodology. In MSM, a subset of symbol aligned samples is randomly masked, and a Transformer predicts the missing symbol identifiers using the surrounding "in-between" samples. Through this objective, the model learns the latent syntax of complex baseband waveforms. We illustrate MSM's potential by applying it to the task of demodulating signals corrupted by impulsive noise, where the model infers corrupted segments by leveraging the learned context. Our results suggest a path toward receivers that interpret, rather than merely detect communication signals, opening new avenues for context-aware PHY layer design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01428
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Masked Symbol Modeling for Demodulation of Oversampled Baseband Communication Signals in Impulsive Noise-Dominated Channels
Bedir, Oguz
Sevim, Nurullah
Ibrahim, Mostafa
Ekin, Sabit
Signal Processing
Machine Learning
Sound
Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing show that attention mechanism in Transformer networks, trained via masked-token prediction, enables models to capture the semantic context of the tokens and internalize the grammar of language. While the application of Transformers to communication systems is a burgeoning field, the notion of context within physical waveforms remains under-explored. This paper addresses that gap by re-examining inter-symbol contribution (ISC) caused by pulse-shaping overlap. Rather than treating ISC as a nuisance, we view it as a deterministic source of contextual information embedded in oversampled complex baseband signals. We propose Masked Symbol Modeling (MSM), a framework for the physical (PHY) layer inspired by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers methodology. In MSM, a subset of symbol aligned samples is randomly masked, and a Transformer predicts the missing symbol identifiers using the surrounding "in-between" samples. Through this objective, the model learns the latent syntax of complex baseband waveforms. We illustrate MSM's potential by applying it to the task of demodulating signals corrupted by impulsive noise, where the model infers corrupted segments by leveraging the learned context. Our results suggest a path toward receivers that interpret, rather than merely detect communication signals, opening new avenues for context-aware PHY layer design.
title Masked Symbol Modeling for Demodulation of Oversampled Baseband Communication Signals in Impulsive Noise-Dominated Channels
topic Signal Processing
Machine Learning
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01428