arXiv subjects

Ahmed Alkhateeb

Publications and source records attributed to Ahmed Alkhateeb.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Spatial MIMO Channel Rendering: A 3D Gaussian Splatting Approach

The achievable gains of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems depend on channel state information (CSI), whose acquisition consumes pilot and feedback resources for every user in every coherence interval. Meanwhile, the propagation environment that shapes the channel persists. Exploiting such information will help to greatly reduce the overhead of CSI acquisition. This paper investigates the spatial MIMO channel rendering problem, which learns a latent beamspace channel scene from sparse observations and renders the long-term transmit and receive beam pair power map at unobserved user locations. Motivated by 3D Gaussian splatting in visual scene rendering, the proposed MIMO Gaussian splatting (MIMO-GS) represents the scene with pairs of receive and transmit 3D Gaussians, projects them from the user and base station onto the corresponding beam domains, and accumulates the beam associations through beam pair splatting. On a simulated urban scenario and measured indoor channels, MIMO-GS renders 5.5 times faster than ray tracing without a calibrated replica. Applied to multiuser beam management, the rendered maps allow users and transmit beams to be scheduled without sounding while accounting for the inter-user interference, and the net sum rate reaches 98% of the genie-aided benchmark, 19% above a position-based predictor.

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arXiv2026

LWM-TF: A Wireless Foundation Model on 5G NR Time-Frequency Resource Grids

Received OFDM grids preserve both pilot and payload observations, yet wireless foundation models are rarely pre-trained on them. We introduce LWM-TF, a 9.58M-parameter factorized masked autoencoder pre-trained on complex 5G NR uplink grids taken after the FFT and before channel estimation. Each block attends first across OFDM symbols and then across resource blocks and receive antennas, and the mask follows the same two axes. Because the payload phase is unpredictable, the model reconstructs the normalized log-power of each masked token and predicts its scale separately; ablations show that the two terms are complementary and that this target outperforms complex-signal reconstruction. The encoder is pre-trained on 850,496 physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) slots from a 10^6-slot dataset simulated with the NR transmit chain under various channel conditions. With the encoder frozen, linear probes classify modulation, predict CRC success, and detect UE mobility. On a separately generated test set, 16 labeled slots per class give 0.85 modulation accuracy, 0.82 CRC area under the ROC curve (AUROC), and 0.73 mobility AUROC, ahead of a supervised CNN on every paired draw. With 10,000 labels the probes reach 0.94, 0.96, and 0.92, well above engineered receiver statistics, and detect mobility where the CNN stays at chance. Without any impairment labels, distances in the frozen feature space flag unseen waveform impairments with 0.78 macro AUROC, against 0.68 for receiver statistics. A single pre-trained encoder thus provides receiver features that transfer across tasks, most strongly when labels are scarce.

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arXiv2026

Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks for Sensing-Aided Beam Prediction

Sensing-aided beam prediction can reduce the beam-training overhead of millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems by leveraging environmental information from complementary modalities such as vision and position. However, the resulting sensing and inference pipeline can be energy-intensive, motivating the use of energy-efficient spiking neural networks (SNNs) as an alternative to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this work, we develop SNN architectures for beam prediction and systematically compare them with ANNs using position-only, vision-only, and multimodal inputs. Our results show that compact ANNs consistently outperform SNNs for position-only sensing. In contrast, for vision and multimodal sensing, SNNs achieve higher accuracy than ANNs at similar energy costs and require up to an order of magnitude less energy at a comparable accuracy. For example, the multimodal SNN achieves 58.08% top-1 accuracy, outperforming the closest-energy ANN by 18.11 percentage points. We further show that SNN accuracy is limited by the binary communication between layers rather than by model size. These results demonstrate the potential of SNNs for energy-efficient sensing-aided beam prediction while highlighting their accuracy limitation.

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arXiv2026

Freshness-Aware Constrained Sensing-Aided Beam Prediction with Knowledge Distillation

Beam prediction leveraging environmental data reduces over-the-air beam training overhead. Existing frameworks, however, assume continuous access to fresh sensory data, an assumption that breaks down under sensing budget constraints or sensor failures. To make this more practical, this paper proposes a sensing-aided beam prediction framework that operates under an average sensing rate constraint. We incorporate the age of information (AoI) directly into the beam prediction pipeline as a synthetic input modality: the age of the most recently captured data is encoded and fused with visual features through a gating mechanism. This provides the predictor with explicit context information about input sensory data reliability. We formalize and examine three fixed sampling policies, accumulated, uniform, and randomized, under the average sensing budget. We further develop a knowledge distillation (KD) framework that operates as a robustness regularizer rather than a pure model compression method. In particular, the high-capacity teacher is trained unconstrained on fully sampled data, and its representational knowledge is transferred to a compact student deployed under the sensing budget. We conduct numerical experiments on the DeepSense 6G data set. The results show that AoI fusion nearly doubles top-1 accuracy at strict sensing budgets, and age-aware models achieve near-optimal top-3 accuracy with only 20% of the data. Furthermore, we find that the teacher training regime is a more consequential design choice than the distillation loss function.

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arXiv2026

Beamforming Design Via GNN in mmWave Cell-Free Massive MIMO Using Sub-6 GHz CSI

Beamforming methods in millimeter-wave (mmWave) cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) systems require accurate channel state information (CSI), whose acquisition entails significant training overhead. This paper shows that fully digital cell-free mmWave beamforming can be effectively learned from sub-6 GHz CSI using a graph neural network (GNN). Specifically, we represent a CFmMIMO system as a wireless graph, and the GNN is trained to approximate beamformers that maximize the downlink sum-rate based on the available sub-6 GHz CSI. A message-passing mechanism is proposed to capture inter-user interference and inter-base-station cooperation across different network topologies. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed sub-6 GHz-assisted GNN-based beamformer achieves competitive and often superior sum-rate performance compared to classical baselines that rely on full mmWave CSI.

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arXiv2026

Digital Twin-Aided Prescreening for User Scheduling in MU-MIMO Downlink Systems

In dense deployments, massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) base stations can acquire instantaneous channel state information (CSI) for only a limited subset of users per scheduling interval, restricting multiuser diversity. We therefore propose Digital Twin User pre-Screening (DiTUS), a digital-twin (DT)-aided framework that identifies promising users before instantaneous CSI acquisition. DiTUS forms spatial covariances from DT-inferred departure angles and path powers. Optional Gaussian-process (GP) calibration mitigates path-power bias, while the dominant rank-r eigenspace of the aggregate covariance yields common reference beams. It prescreens the pool using DiTUS-P, a low-complexity projection-energy rule, or DiTUS-L, a greedy log-determinant rule that promotes spatial compatibility. A two-level protocol collects scalar beam reports from shortlisted users and requests r-dimensional effective-channel vectors only from the scheduled set. The framework also supports proportional-fair scheduling. At 15 dB under DT imperfections, simulations with 128 candidates, a 64-user effective-CSI acquisition budget, and a 64-user shortlist show that DiTUS-L achieves 35.06 +/- 0.49 bps/Hz versus 30.28 +/- 0.60 bps/Hz for semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS) with full-dimensional CSI from 64 users, demonstrating that DT-based prescreening preserves substantial multiuser-diversity gains by identifying strong, spatially compatible users before acquiring effective-channel vectors.

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arXiv2026

Lightweight Vision-Aided Beam Tracking for Cross-Environment mmWave Communications

Sensing-aided beam tracking is a promising approach to reduce the overhead for millimeter-wave beam management. However, real-world application remains challenging due to rapid channel variations and substantial environmental differences across deployment scenarios. Developing low-complexity sensing assisted approaches that generalize to diverse environments can alleviate the problem. With this motivation, this paper proposes a lightweight vision-aided model for cross-environment beam tracking. The task is formulated as a sequence-to-sequence classification problem, where the model jointly predicts the current and future optimal beams from past visual observations. We develop a low-complexity model based on depthwise separable convolutions and introduce hierarchical data augmentation and beam power-based label smoothing to improve robustness and generalization. Experimental results on real-world images from two geometrically distinct DeepSense 6G scenarios show that the proposed strategies consistently improve cross-environment beam prediction accuracy up to 84% across the current and three future time slots, outperforming the state-of-the-art solution. Notably, this performance is achieved while reducing the number of model parameters and computational complexity by factors of approximately 52 and 79, respectively, compared with the high-capacity ResNet baseline.

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arXiv2026

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for LiDAR-Aided Beam Tracking in MmWave Systems

We propose a data-free knowledge distillation (DF- KD) framework for LiDAR-aided mmWave beam tracking, where the objective is to predict the optimal current and future beams from a sequence of past LiDAR measurements. Specifically, we propose a knowledge inversion approach where a generator synthesizes LiDAR-like sequences from random noise, using a metadata loss to align the teachers internal feature statistics of synthetic and real data, without access to raw LiDAR samples. The student model is then trained exclusively on the synthetic data using either the Kullback- Leibler (KL) divergence loss or a proposed mean squared error (MSE) loss between the teachers and students raw output logits. Simulation results on the DeepSense dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In particular, the proposed convolutional neural network-gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) teacher architecture yields superior DF-KD student performance compared to GRU-only alternatives, and the MSE loss achieves performance comparable to the standard KD loss while requiring fewer hyperparamete

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arXiv2026

LWM-CDE: A Representation Space for Wireless Data Reasoning and Transferability

Machine learning deployments in real-world wireless communication tasks face significant generalization challenges due to location and environment-specific signal structure, high diversity in data across different deployments, and limited availability of real-world data. Current approaches for assessing data similarity between training and inference (deployment) distributions, as well as evaluating model transferability, suffer from high computational costs and inconsistent performance, leaving critical model deployment and model life cycle management decisions without a principled foundation. To address this, we introduce a dataset similarity framework built upon the feature space of a pretrained wireless foundation model. Our method, LWM-CDE (Contrastive learning of Dataset Embedding), fine-tunes the dataset embeddings of the foundation model using a combination of contrastive and geometry-shaping losses, creating a structured manifold where distance reliably indicates transferability. Extensive experiments on wireless benchmarks show that LWM-CDE achieves stronger correlation with empirical transfer performance than existing metrics while being more computationally efficient. The learned representation space supports more effective and data-efficient decision-making for tasks like source dataset selection, label-aware augmentation, and budgeted pretraining, demonstrating its broader utility across different wireless communication applications.

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arXiv2026

RadTwin: Generalizable Wireless Digital Twin for Dynamic Environments

Precisely modeling radio propagation in dynamic wireless environments is fundamental to the realization of wireless digital twins. Traditional ray tracing methods rely on accurate 3D models with detailed environment parameters, while recent neural radiance field approaches learn representations tied to specific static scenes, requiring retraining when environments change. In this paper, we propose RadTwin, a generalizable wireless digital twin framework that explicitly conditions on scene geometry, enabling adaptation to dynamic environments without retraining. RadTwin comprises three key components: 1) a scenario representation network that extracts high-level latent scene features from point clouds, 2) an electromagnetic ray tracing module that computes physics-informed sparse attention masks identifying voxels that physically contribute signals toward each query direction, and 3) a neural propagation decoder that aggregates relevant scene features through masked cross-attention to learn how radio propagation behaves within the given scene geometry. We evaluate RadTwin on a customized dataset of indoor scenes with varying furniture arrangements. Experimental results show that RadTwin achieves 31.6% higher SSIM (0.846 vs. 0.643) and 91.96% lower LPIPS (0.023 vs. 0.286) compared to NeRF2. RadTwin further demonstrates superior cross-scale performance and high generalization and data efficiency, representing a significant advancement toward practical digital network twins for dynamic wireless environments.

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arXiv2026

Wireless Digital Twin Calibration: Refining DFT-Domain Channel Information

Wireless digital twins can be leveraged to provide site-specific synthetic channel information through precise physical modeling and signal propagation simulations. This can help reduce the overhead of channel state information (CSI) acquisition, particularly needed for large-scale MIMO systems. For high-quality digital twin channels, the classical approach is to increase the digital twin fidelity via more accurate modeling of the environment, propagation, and hardware. This, however, comes with high computational cost, making it unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a new framework that, instead of calibrating the digital twin model itself, calibrates the DFT-domain channel information to reduce the gap between the low-fidelity digital twin and its high-fidelity counterpart or the real world. This allows systems to leverage a low-complexity digital twin for generating real-time channel information without compromising quality. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we adopt codebook-based CSI feedback as a case study, where refined synthetic channel information is used to identify the most relevant DFT codewords for each user. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed digital twin calibration approach in achieving high CSI acquisition accuracy while reducing the computational overhead of the digital twin. This paves the way for realizing digital twin assisted wireless systems.

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arXiv2026

Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Multimodal Sensing-Aided mmWave Beam Tracking

Beam training and prediction in real-world millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications systems are challenging due to rapidly time-varying channels and strong interference from surrounding objects. In this context, widely available sensors, such as cameras and radars, can capture rich environmental information, enabling efficient beam management. This paper proposes a knowledge-distillation (KD)-enabled learning framework for developing lightweight and low-complexity models for beam prediction and tracking using real-world camera and radar data from the DeepSense 6G dataset. Specifically, a powerful teacher network based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and gated recurrent units (GRUs) is first designed to predict current and future beams from historical sensor observations. Then, a compact student model is constructed and trained via KD to transfer the predictive capability of the teacher model to a lightweight architecture. Simulation results demonstrate that jointly leveraging radar and image modalities significantly outperforms single-modality approaches. Moreover, the proposed student model achieves over 96% Top-5 beam prediction accuracy while reducing computational complexity by more than 4 times and the number of parameters by over 27 times compared with the teacher model.

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arXiv2026

ISAC with Backscattering RFID Tags: Beamforming and Codebook Design

This paper explores an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with backscattering RFID tags. In this setup, an access point employs communication beams to serve communication users while leveraging a sensing beam to interrogate RFID tags. Under the total transmit power constraint of the system, our objective is to design a joint sensing and communication beamforming codebook by considering the tag interrogation and communication requirements. To lay a foundation for the codebook design problem, we first study the beamforming design problem in a single-tag scenario and investigate two approaches: (i) a zero-forcing approach with optimized sensing/communication power allocation, for which a closed-form solution is derived under a dominant sensitivity condition, and (ii) a joint sensing and communication beamforming design obtained by transmit power minimization. Then, we investigate the codebook design problem in a multi-tag scenario. To resolve this, we propose a sector-based joint sensing and communication beamforming codebook that scans the region of interest. For each sector, semidefinite relaxation and generalized Benders decomposition are employed to handle the resulting optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed joint beamforming designs can effectively mitigate the mutual interference between sensing and communication functionalities, thus enhancing the interrogation range of the tags with minimized transmit power. Also, the efficacy of the proposed sector-based codebook design has been demonstrated in terms of interrogation success rate, offering a promising approach for the ISAC-backscattering systems.

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arXiv2026

LWM-Temporal: Sparse Spatio-Temporal Attention for Wireless Channel Representation Learning

LWM-Temporal is a new member of the Large Wireless Models (LWM) family that targets the spatiotemporal nature of wireless channels. Designed as a task-agnostic foundation model, LWM-Temporal learns universal channel embeddings that capture mobility-induced evolution and are reusable across various downstream tasks. To achieve this objective, LWM-Temporal operates in the angle-delay-time domain and introduces Sparse Spatio-Temporal Attention (SSTA), a propagation-aligned attention mechanism that restricts interactions to physically plausible neighborhoods, reducing attention complexity by an order of magnitude while preserving geometry-consistent dependencies. LWM-Temporal is pretrained in a self-supervised manner using a physics-informed masking curriculum that emulates realistic occlusions, pilot sparsity, and measurement impairments. Experimental results on channel prediction across multiple mobility regimes show consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly under long horizons and limited fine-tuning data, highlighting the importance of geometry-aware architectures and geometry-consistent pretraining for learning transferable spatiotemporal wireless representations.

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arXiv2026

Knowledge Distillation for mmWave Beam Prediction Using Sub-6 GHz Channels

Beamforming in millimeter-wave (mmWave) high-mobility environments typically incurs substantial training overhead. While prior studies suggest that sub-6 GHz channels can be exploited to predict optimal mmWave beams, existing methods depend on large deep learning (DL) models with prohibitive computational and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient framework for sub-6 GHz channel-mmWave beam mapping based on the knowledge distillation (KD) technique. We develop two compact student DL architectures based on individual and relational distillation strategies, which retain only a few hidden layers yet closely mimic the performance of large teacher DL models. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed student models achieve the teacher's beam prediction accuracy and spectral efficiency while reducing trainable parameters and computational complexity by 99%.

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arXiv2026

Generative Decompression: Optimal Lossy Decoding Against Distribution Mismatch

This paper addresses optimal decoding strategies in lossy compression where the assumed distribution for compressor design mismatches the actual (true) distribution of the source. This problem has immediate relevance in standardized communication systems where the decoder acquires side information or priors about the true distribution that are unavailable to the fixed encoder. We formally define the mismatched quantization problem, demonstrating that the optimal reconstruction rule, termed generative decompression, aligns with classical Bayesian estimation by taking the conditional expectation under the true distribution given the quantization indices and adapting it to fixed-encoder constraints. This strategy effectively performs a generative Bayesian correction on the decoder side, strictly outperforming the conventional centroid rule. We extend this framework to transmission over noisy channels, deriving a robust soft-decoding rule that quantifies the inefficiency of standard modular source--channel separation architectures under mismatch. Furthermore, we generalize the approach to task-oriented decoding, showing that the optimal strategy shifts from conditional mean estimation to maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection. Experimental results on Gaussian sources and deep-learning-based semantic classification demonstrate that generative decompression closes a vast majority of the performance gap to the ideal joint-optimization benchmark, enabling adaptive, high-fidelity reconstruction without modifying the encoder.

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arXiv2026

LWM-Spectro: A Foundation Model for Wireless Baseband Signal Spectrograms

The received in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) baseband signals inherently encode physical-layer and channel characteristics of wireless links. Learning robust and transferable representations directly from such raw signals, however, remains challenging due to heterogeneous communication systems, diverse propagation environments, and limited labeled data. To address this, we present LWM-Spectro, a transformer-based foundation model pretrained on large-scale I/Q data represented as time-frequency spectrograms. The model leverages self-supervised masked modeling, contrastive learning, and a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to learn general-purpose wireless representations. These representations transfer effectively to downstream tasks such as modulation classification and joint SNR/mobility recognition, even with minimal supervision. Across tasks, LWM-Spectro consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning baselines in both few-shot and data-rich regimes, providing a unified foundation for wireless learning.

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arXiv2026

Wireless Dataset Similarity: Measuring Distances in Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning

This paper introduces a task- and model-aware framework for measuring similarity between wireless datasets, enabling applications such as dataset selection/augmentation, simulation-to-real (sim2real) comparison, task-specific synthetic data generation, and informing decisions on model training/adaptation to new deployments. We evaluate candidate dataset distance metrics by how well they predict cross-dataset transferability: if two datasets have a small distance, a model trained on one should perform well on the other. We apply the framework on an unsupervised task, channel state information (CSI) compression, using autoencoders. Using metrics based on UMAP embeddings, combined with Wasserstein and Euclidean distances, we achieve Pearson correlations exceeding 0.85 between dataset distances and train-on-one/test-on-another task performance. We also apply the framework to a supervised beam prediction in the downlink using convolutional neural networks. For this task, we derive a label-aware distance by integrating supervised UMAP and penalties for dataset imbalance. Across both tasks, the resulting distances outperform traditional baselines and consistently exhibit stronger correlations with model transferability, supporting task-relevant comparisons between wireless datasets.

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