Publication

Decision Feedback In-Context Symbol Detection over Block-Fading Channels

Publication Info

Publication

ICC 2025 - IEEE International Conference on Communications

Abstract

Pre-trained Transformers, through in-context learning (ICL), have demonstrated exceptional capabilities to adapt to new tasks using example prompts without model update. Transformer-based wireless receivers, where prompts consist of the pilot data in the form of transmitted and received signal pairs, have shown high estimation accuracy when pilot data are abundant. However, pilot information is often costly and limited in practice. In this work, we propose the DEcision Feedback INContExt Detection (DEFINED) solution as a new wireless receiver design, which bypasses channel estimation and directly performs symbol detection using the (sometimes extremely) limited pilot data. The key innovation in DEFINED is the proposed decision feedback mechanism in ICL, where we sequentially incorporate the detected symbols into the prompts to improve the detections for subsequent symbols. Extensive experiments across a broad range of wireless communication settings demonstrate that DEFINED achieves significant performance improvements, in some cases only needing a single pilot pair.

CiTation

L. Fan, J. Yang, C. Shen and C. L. Brown, "Decision Feedback In-Context Symbol Detection Over Block-Fading Channels," ICC 2025 - IEEE International Conference on Communications, Montreal, QC, Canada, 2025, pp. 3785-3790, doi: 10.1109/ICC52391.2025.11161684.

Contributors

Info

Date:
September 26, 2025
Type:
Conference Paper
DOI:
10.1109/ICC52391.2025.11161684