In this talk, I will present our recent work on enhancing the robustness and adaptability of deep learning-based semantic communication (SemCom) systems, which are increasingly vital for efficient next-generation wireless networks. Traditional SemCom approaches often struggle with wireless channel uncertainties, source data outliers, and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SemCom framework powered by latent diffusion models. The framework introduces three key innovations: an outlier-robust encoder trained via semantic adversarial perturbations; a lightweight, single-layer latent adapter for one-shot learning and improved adaptation to out-of-distribution data; and an end-to-end consistency distillation (EECD) method enabling low-latency, high-quality denoising in noisy environments. Together, these components significantly enhance the resilience, adaptability, and semantic fidelity of SemCom systems in real-world scenarios.

Biography:

Ping Wang is a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University, and a Tier 2 York Research Chair. Prior to that, she was with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, from 2008 to 2018. Her recent research interests focus on integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques into communications networks. Her scholarly works have been widely disseminated through top-ranked IEEE journals/conferences, cited over 30,000 times, and recognized with several  prestigious awards, including the IEEE Communications Society Best Survey Paper Award in 2023, and the Best Paper Awards from IEEE prestigious conference WCNC in 2012, 2020 and 2022, from IEEE Communication Society: Green Communications & Computing Technical Committee in 2018, from IEEE flagship conference ICC in 2007. She has been serving as the Associate Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials and an Editor for several reputed journals, including IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS). She is also the Chair of the Education Committee of IEEE VTS.