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CAIC-Net: Robust Radio Modulation Classification via Unified Dynamic Cross-Attention and Cross-Signal-to-Noise Ratio Contrastive Learning

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Bibliographic Details
Title: CAIC-Net: Robust Radio Modulation Classification via Unified Dynamic Cross-Attention and Cross-Signal-to-Noise Ratio Contrastive Learning
Authors: Teng Wu, Quan Zhu, Runze Mao, Changzhen Hu, Shengjun Wei
Source: Sensors ; Volume 26 ; Issue 3 ; Pages: 756
Publisher Information: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Publication Year: 2026
Collection: MDPI Open Access Publishing
Subject Terms: automatic modulation classification, deep learning techniques, feature-based extraction, dynamic cross-attention
Description: In complex wireless communication environments, automatic modulation classification (AMC) faces two critical challenges: the lack of robustness under low-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions and the inefficiency of integrating multi-scale feature representations. To address these issues, this paper proposes CAIC-Net, a robust modulation classification network that integrates a dynamic cross-attention mechanism with a cross-SNR contrastive learning strategy. CAIC-Net employs a dual-stream feature extractor composed of ConvLSTM2D and Transformer blocks to capture local temporal dependencies and global contextual relationships, respectively. To enhance fusion effectiveness, we design a Dynamic Cross-Attention Unit (CAU) that enables deep bidirectional interaction between the two branches while incorporating an SNR-aware mechanism to adaptively adjust the fusion strategy under varying channel conditions. In addition, a Cross-SNR Contrastive Learning (CSCL) module is introduced as an auxiliary task, where positive and negative sample pairs are constructed across different SNR levels and optimized using InfoNCE loss. This design significantly strengthens the intrinsic noise-invariant properties of the learned representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two standard datasets demonstrate that CAIC-Net achieves competitive classification performance at moderate-to-high SNRs and exhibits clear advantages in extremely low-SNR scenarios, validating the effectiveness and strong generalization capability of the proposed approach.
Document Type: text
File Description: application/pdf
Language: English
Relation: Communications; https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s26030756
DOI: 10.3390/s26030756
Availability: https://doi.org/10.3390/s26030756
Rights: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Accession Number: edsbas.57DCDC72
Database: BASE
Description
Abstract:In complex wireless communication environments, automatic modulation classification (AMC) faces two critical challenges: the lack of robustness under low-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions and the inefficiency of integrating multi-scale feature representations. To address these issues, this paper proposes CAIC-Net, a robust modulation classification network that integrates a dynamic cross-attention mechanism with a cross-SNR contrastive learning strategy. CAIC-Net employs a dual-stream feature extractor composed of ConvLSTM2D and Transformer blocks to capture local temporal dependencies and global contextual relationships, respectively. To enhance fusion effectiveness, we design a Dynamic Cross-Attention Unit (CAU) that enables deep bidirectional interaction between the two branches while incorporating an SNR-aware mechanism to adaptively adjust the fusion strategy under varying channel conditions. In addition, a Cross-SNR Contrastive Learning (CSCL) module is introduced as an auxiliary task, where positive and negative sample pairs are constructed across different SNR levels and optimized using InfoNCE loss. This design significantly strengthens the intrinsic noise-invariant properties of the learned representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two standard datasets demonstrate that CAIC-Net achieves competitive classification performance at moderate-to-high SNRs and exhibits clear advantages in extremely low-SNR scenarios, validating the effectiveness and strong generalization capability of the proposed approach.
DOI:10.3390/s26030756