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Abstract:In generative semantic communication, semantic tokens guide receiver-side generative models to synthesize high-dimensional content. In challenging network environments, however, frequent token erasure distorts the conveyed semantics beyond what receiver-side recovery can restore. In this paper, we propose a token encoding framework (TokCode) for robust semantic recovery, achieving erasure resilience by restructuring redundancy in the semantic domain. TokCode uses a lightweight adapter to recast a general-purpose large language model (LLM) at the transmitter into a token encoder, exploiting the LLM's pretrained semantic prior to avoid introducing a dedicated deep model. To optimize the adapter efficiently and make it applicable across diverse channels, we develop a channel-quality-aware distillation approach for token encoder training~(CADET). Using a differentiable sentence-level semantic surrogate, CADET tunes T5 foundation models into experts for distinct erasure rates and distills them into a single reconfigurable low-rank adapter, enabling subsequent reinforcement learning (RL) to start above the plateau where direct RL stalls. Simulation results on token-based generative image transmission show that TokCode improves the image-level similarity over the best-performing receiver-side recovery benchmark by 14.1%--22.4%, closing 71.9%--76.5% of its gap to the erasure-aware oracle encoding, when only 20% to 50% of the tokens survive.

Submission history

From: Jingzhi Hu [view email]
[v1] Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:20:28 UTC (5,554 KB)
[v2] Sun, 6 Sep 2026 00:59:59 UTC (4,436 KB)