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Task-Oriented Low-Label Semantic Communication With Self-Supervised Learning

2025/05/26 by 潤 深谷, Wei Xu, Gu, Run +7
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #Text and Document Classification Technologies #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.19940

openalex publication_date 2025/05/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Task-oriented semantic communication enhances transmission efficiency by conveying semantic information rather than exact messages. Deep learning (DL)-based semantic communication can effectively cultivate the essential semantic knowledge for semantic extraction, transmission, and interpretation by leveraging massive labeled samples for downstream task training. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning-based semantic communication framework (SLSCom) to enhance task inference performance, particularly in scenarios with limited access to labeled samples. Specifically, we develop a task-relevant semantic encoder using unlabeled samples, which can be collected by devices in real-world edge networks. To facilitate task-relevant semantic extraction, we introduce self-supervision for learning contrastive features and formulate the information bottleneck (IB) problem to balance the tradeoff between the informativeness of the extracted features and task inference performance. Given the computational challenges of the IB problem, we devise a practical and effective solution by employing self-supervised classification and reconstruction pretext tasks. We further propose efficient joint training methods to enhance end-to-end inference accuracy over wireless channels, even with few labeled samples. We evaluate the proposed framework on image classification tasks over multipath wireless channels. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that SLSCom significantly outperforms conventional digital coding methods and existing DL-based approaches across varying labeled data set sizes and SNR conditions, even when the unlabeled samples are irrelevant to the downstream tasks.

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