Jingwen Fu, Ming Xiao
Abstract
Semantic communication (SemCom) and task-oriented communication (TOC) can reduce wireless resource consumption by focusing on transmitting semantic or task-relevant information instead of raw messages. In practice, a main challenge is to make transmitting information robust to channel noise and fading while keeping it compact. Existing learning-based transceivers often improve reliability by using larger encoders or higher-dimensional channel features, which increase computation complexity and channel uses. Therefore, optimized system design needs explicit rate control to balance performance and transmitting resources e.g., bandwidth and power. For this purpose, we propose a manifold-constrained hyper-connection (mHC) coding scheme with an entropy bottleneck (EB) for resource-efficient SemCom and TOC over wireless channels. Instead of using a single residual path of existing encoders, the proposed mHC-based semantic encoder applies multiple residual streams and constrains their interaction by doubly stochastic (DS) mixing matrices. The new structure improves representation diversity and training stability with negligible parameter and floating-point overhead. The EB quantizes the channel features and estimates the entropy-coded rate, enabling end-to-end rate--distortion/task optimization under bandwidth and transmit-power constraints. We further show that DS-constrained stream mixing does not increase the differential entropy of the transmitted features. This implies no increase in the ideal EB coding length. Experiments on SemCom and TOC under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), Rayleigh fading, Rician fading, and imperfect channel state information (CSI) show that the proposed scheme improves semantic/task performance, communication robustness, and convergence stability over residual and unconstrained HC baselines, while requiring no additional channel uses.