Semantics-Aware Hierarchical Token Communication: Clustering, Bit Mapping, and Power Allocation
Jihoon Lee, Seungeun Oh, Jihong Park, Seong-Lyun Kim, and Seung-Woo Ko

TL;DR
This paper introduces H-TokCom, a hierarchical token communication framework that embeds semantic structure into physical-layer design, improving semantic robustness over traditional approaches especially at low SNR.
Contribution
It proposes a novel hierarchical token communication scheme that clusters semantically similar tokens and allocates power accordingly to reduce semantic loss.
Findings
H-TokCom increases semantic similarity from 0.206 to 0.279 at 3 dB SNR on COCO.
Hierarchical design improves robustness against errors within semantic clusters.
Power allocation to cluster prefixes enhances semantic preservation.
Abstract
Despite the rise of token communication (TokCom) as a new paradigm beyond traditional bit communication, existing approaches have primarily adopted artificial intelligence (AI)-centric designs that rely on semantic recovery via large models. Meanwhile, their physical-layer designs, such as token-bit mapping and power allocation, remain conventional and do not reflect token-level semantics. These semantics-agnostic designs can lead to significant semantic loss, particularly at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. To address this issue, we propose hierarchical TokCom (H-TokCom), a framework that embeds semantic structure directly into physical-layer design. The key idea is to group semantically similar tokens into clusters and hierarchically assign their bit representations, where each token is represented by a cluster-level prefix and a token-specific suffix. As long as the cluster…
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