Joint modulation recognition and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) estimation can reduce duplicated processing in intelligent receivers, but the two tasks have different uncertainty characteristics. This letter proposes an uncertainty-aware multi-task model that transforms each short normalized in-phase/quadrature window into 36 deterministic, label-free statistics, learns a shared representation, and uses task-specific adapters for modulation classification and heteroscedastic SINR regression. A joint uncertainty score combines classification entropy and predicted regression variance to support selective inference. Simulations cover QPSK, 8PSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM under matched additive white Gaussian noise/Rayleigh channels and an unseen frequency-selective Rician channel. Over five independent seeds, the proposed model improves matched and unseen-channel accuracy over conventional multi-task learning by 14.86 and 8.61 percentage points, respectively, while reducing SINR mean absolute error by 1.60 and 1.61 dB. Confidence-based rejection further lowers modulation error under channel mismatch.
TABLE II: Overall performance. Neural results are mean ± standard deviation over five independent seeds.
Fig. 2: Matched-channel performance versus SINR: (a) modulation-classification accuracy and (b) SINR-estimation RMSE. Neural curves are means over five independent seeds.
Fig. 3: Selective inference under unseen Rician fading: (a) modulation-classification error and (b) SINR-estimation MAE versus retained coverage.
Fig. 4: Row-normalized confusion matrices of the proposed method under (a) matched channels and (b) the unseen frequency-selective Rician channel.
Model
Matched
Unseen Rician
Raw-I/Q hybrid
0.494/3.486
0.403/4.934
Final proposed
0.500/3.302
0.407/4.703
TABLE III: Validation-based architecture selection. Entries are accuracy/MAE (dB).
Automatic modulation classification identifies radio signal modulation schemes from received waveforms, often under noise, fading, and limited labeled data.
Precise interference detection and identification are crucial for enhancing the survivability of communication systems in non-cooperative wireless environments. While deep learning (DL) has advanced this field, existing single-task learning (STL) approaches neglect inherent task correlations. Furthermore, emerging multi-task learning (MTL) methods often lack a theoretical foundation for quantifying and modeling task relationships. To bridge this gap, we establish a theoretically grounded MTL framework for joint interference detection, modulation identification, and interference identification. First, we derive an upper bound for the weighted expected loss in MTL frameworks. This bound explicitly connects MTL performance to task similarity, quantified by the Wasserstein distance and learnable task relation coefficients. Guided by this theory, we present the adversarial multi-task interference detection and identification network (AMTIDIN), which integrates adversarial training to minimize distributional discrepancies across tasks and uses adaptive coefficients to model task correlations dynamically. Crucially, we conducted a quantitative analysis of task similarity to reveal intrinsic task relationships, specifically that modulation identification and interference identification share a substantial feature overlap distinct from interference detection. Experiments demonstrate that AMTIDIN outperforms its independently trained single-task counterparts and MTL baselines under the evaluated conditions of limited training data, short signal lengths, and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)
H. Xu, L. Hu, B. He +1
College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410003, P. R. China
Multi-antenna receiving systems have become a prevalent technical solution in communication systems. Meanwhile, deep learning has achieved significant progress in automatic modulation recognition tasks in single-antenna systems. However, the application of deep learning in multi-antenna modulation recognition (MAMR) tasks is still limited. In this paper, we propose an MAMR method namely MAMR-IQ to fully explore the diversity gain of a multi-antenna receiving system, which concatenates the raw received in-phase and quadrature (IQ) signals of multiple antennas and feeds them into a convolutional neural network. Simulation results show that the proposed MAMR-IQ method outperforms two existing deep learning-based MAMR methods which are based on direct voting (DV) and weight average (WA) in terms of both recognition accuracy and computational complexity. To address the problem of limited training data in few-shot scenarios, we further propose a data augmentation method that involves exchanging IQ sequences received by any two antennas to generate augmented samples. Simulation results show that with the proposed augmentation method, the recognition accuracy can be further improved.
Tao Chen, Shilian Zheng, Jiepeng Chen +3
College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Quzhou University, Quzhou 324000, China · National Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Space Security, Jiaxing 314033, China · Institute of Cyberspace Security, and also with the College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou2026 310023, China
Automatic RF modulation recognition is of critical importance in spectrum monitoring, electronic warfare, and cognitive radio applications, where low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions and the growing diversity of modulation schemes limit the performance of existing methods. This paper proposes an uncertainty-driven hybrid deep learning architecture for recognizing RF signals over a broad modulation space. The proposed approach carries out a multi-stage classification process by combining spectral information obtained through low-cost FFT-based preprocessing with time-frequency features extracted from short-time Fourier transform (STFT) spectrograms. The architecture comprises a 2D convolutional neural network (2D CNN)-based path for fast, low-latency primary classification, MC Dropout-supported Bayesian uncertainty estimation for assessing classification reliability, and a BiLSTM-based secondary decision mechanism activated under high-uncertainty conditions. The proposed system is evaluated in a controlled simulation environment spanning different SNR levels and modulation classes. Experimental results show that the primary 2D CNN path achieves 83.3±0.7% accuracy with an inference time of only 0.138 ms per sample, providing superior performance compared with traditional rule-based and classical machine-learning approaches. Furthermore, the obtained findings reveal the limitations of compact spectral feature representations and classifiers lacking temporal modeling, particularly in disambiguating FSK-based modulations. The uncertainty estimation module offers promising results for detecting low-confidence decisions, and the proposed approach demonstrates the potential of a low-latency and scalable solution for real-time RF modulation recognition.
Nurettin Safak, Durdu Can Yerdeyatar, Muhammet Sefa Demirel +3
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Ankara, Turkey