cs.ITAug 14, 2026

Learning-to-Transition for Large-scale and High-Order MIMO Detection

Authors: Yubo Zhang, Yiyao Liu, Xiaodong Wang

Read PDF
Ask AI
Cite

Copy citation

DOINot available for this paper

Abstract

High-order multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection requires efficient search over a large discrete symbol space while producing reliable soft information for channel decoding. This paper develops a learning-to-transition (L2T) framework that formulates MIMO detection as a stochastic sequence of complete-vector transitions. At each transition, a channel-coupled Transformer updates both the instance embedding and the sampling policy, while a blockwise autoregressive factorization captures inter-stream dependence with moderate sequential complexity. For hard-output detection, a transition network is applied recursively and trained through a residual-to-BER curriculum, which first learns the MIMO search geometry from the exact residual metric and then aligns the policy with transmitted-bit accuracy. For soft-output reception, the well-trained hard policy is cloned at the parameter level into every layer of an untied soft-input soft-output iterative detection and decoding (IDD) receiver. This tied-to-untied transfer preserves the learned zero-prior search dynamics while enabling layer- and round-specific specialization under decoder feedback. Within each IDD round, decoder priors tilt candidate generation according to Bayes' rule, and likelihood-weighted terminal hypotheses produce posterior and extrinsic log-likelihood ratios for LDPC decoding. A multi-stage training strategy further stabilizes the hard-to-soft transfer by progressively exposing the receiver to synthetic and in-loop decoder-generated priors.

Figures & tables

Fig. 1: Constellation for Gray-coded data symbols.

Explore similar work

CardsList
May 1, 2026

Soft Graph Diffusion Transformer for MIMO Detection

Learning-based MIMO detection has shown strong empirical performance, yet existing methods typically rely on fixed-depth architectures without explicitly modeling the progressive refinement of symbol estimates. In this paper, we revisit MIMO detection from a flow matching perspective and propose the Soft Graph Diffusion Transformer (SGDiT), which reformulates detection as a noise-level-conditioned denoising process that progressively transforms a Gaussian initialization toward the posterior conditioned on channel observations. An adaptive layer normalization (AdaLN)-conditioned soft graph transformer is employed to parameterize the denoising dynamics, enabling stage-aware information integration between observation and symbol domains. To better align with the discrete nature of symbol detection, we further adopt a cross-entropy-based training objective that directly models bit-wise posterior probabilities, providing a more suitable inductive bias than conventional regression-based formulations. Experimental results across various MIMO system configurations demonstrate that SGDiT achieves competitive bit error rate (BER) performance compared with representative baselines. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits good generalization capability across different channel conditions. Overall, the SGDiT framework provides an effective and practical approach for neural MIMO detection.

Nan Jiang, Jiadong Hong, Lei Liu +3

College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Theory Lab, Central Research Institute, 2012 Labs, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Hong Kong, China

Diffusion TransformerWireless CommunicationsGraph Transformer
AskPDF
May 9, 2025

In-Context Learning for MIMO Turbo Receivers

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) turbo receivers iteratively exchange information between a soft-input soft-output detector and a decoder. Traditional implementations rely on pilot-based channel estimates, which can be poor in the case of short pilot sequences or mismatched channel models, resulting in significant performance degradation. To address this limitation, we introduce the EXTrinsic In-Context Learning Network (EXT-ICLNet), a Transformer-based detector that takes the pilots as in-context examples and is trained to approximate the symbol extrinsic posterior distribution given the pilots, without explicit channel estimation. EXT-ICLNet is thus compatible with existing turbo receivers, as it implements a log-domain prior skip connection, ensuring that the network learns only the extrinsic information. Numerical results for a 4×44\times4 MIMO system with 16-QAM and a quantized front end show that EXT-ICLNet outperforms baselines based on explicit channel state information (CSI) estimation at low-to-medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), as well as expectation-propagation (EP) baselines with perfect CSI at high SNRs. The results are further validated by comparing the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts of EXT-ICLNet, a neural EP baseline, and EXT-ICLNet without skip connection, demonstrating how EXT-ICLNet provides a more favorable transfer of a priori and extrinsic information.

Zihang Song, Matteo Zecchin, Bipin Rajendran +2

The authors are with the Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems (CIIPS), Department of Engineering, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.

Wireless CommunicationsIn-Context Learning
AskPDF
May 1, 2026

GD4: Graph-based Discrete Denoising Diffusion for MIMO Detection

In wireless communications, recovering the optimal solution to the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection problem is NP-hard. Obtaining high-quality suboptimal solutions with a favorable performance-complexity trade-off is particularly challenging in under-determined systems with NtN_t transmit antennas and Nr<NtN_r < N_t receive antennas. Recent diffusion-based MIMO detectors have shown promise, but they require extensive sampling iterations at inference time, and their performance degrades in under-determined scenarios. We propose GD4, a graph-based discrete denoising diffusion method for MIMO detection. Unlike existing diffusion-based detectors that operate in a continuous relaxed space, GD4 performs denoising directly in the discrete symbol space and enables fast inference with one or a few denoising evaluations. Numerical results show that, under a similar inference-time compute budget, GD4 produces higher-quality suboptimal solutions than existing diffusion-based detectors and some widely used classical baseline including box-constrained Babai point and the KK-best box-constrained randomized Klein-Babai point in both under-determined and overdetermined settings.

Qincheng Lu, Sitao Luan, Xiao-Wen Chang

School of Computer Science McGill University Montreal, Canada · University of Montreal Mila - Quebec AI Institute Montreal, Canada

Diffusion Model Inference AccelerationDiffusion ModelsGraph Diffusion
AskPDF