From Denoising to De-Channeling: Integrating Physical Channel Priors into Diffusion Models for Radio Signal Understanding

In recent years, wireless signal recognition (WSR), which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to identify properties of passively received radio signals, has garnered significant attention due to its broad applications, such as spectrum management. Existing WSR methods typically learn directly from received signals, which are distorted by physical wireless channel effects such as fading, and current denoising diffusion models lack de-channeling capabilities, which leads to performance degradation. Therefore, we propose PWC-Diff, a novel framework that integrates prior Physical Wireless Channels into the denoising Diffusion process. The framework employs a dedicated architecture named FusedFormer, which contains a fusion module and a self-attention module that jointly capture the temporal and spectral characteristics of the signals throughout the diffusion trajectory. By leveraging prior wireless channels, PWC-Diff learns to progressively “de-channel” the received signal and recover a representation closer to the transmitted signal. Extensive experiments on several datasets across three WSR tasks have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, which demonstrates the rationality of our theory, and ablation experiments further illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed PWC-Diff.