Towards a Joint Task-Oriented and Generative Semantic Communication Framework for 6G Networks

Abstract

Semantic Communication (SC) has emerged as a key enabler for 6G wireless systems by transmitting task-relevant meaning rather than raw data, thereby significantly reducing bandwidth consumption while preserving communication intent. In this work, we propose an end-to-end OFDM-based semantic communication framework that integrates a semantic encoder-decoder pipeline with a neural receiver operating over a 3GPP vehicular channel. The semantic encoder extracts the underlying meaning of a visual scene by transforming it into a graph-based representation consisting of object-level features and relational structure. At the receiver, the reconstructed scene graph is processed by a spatio-temporal graph neural network (ST-GNN)-based module for collision-risk estimation, enabling task-oriented inference. In parallel, a diffusion-based semantic decoder reconstructs the visual scene from the recovered semantics, providing dual functionality: safety prediction and image reconstruction. The proposed framework is evaluated in a MIMO configuration under varying SNR conditions. Experimental results show that it achieves up to 99.1% data compression relative to pixel-domain transmission, outperforming conventional compression-based methods (JPEG and HEVC) while preserving downstream inference performance. Furthermore, the diffusion-based reconstruction attains significantly lower frechet inception distance (FID) scores than existing semantic communication approaches, reflecting superior semantic and perceptual fidelity.