TOFS: Feature Selection with Swap Supervision for Semantic Communication over Fading Channels

Zhiyi Zhu, Eiji Takimoto, Patrick Finnerty, Chikara Ohta

Task-oriented semantic communication transmits task-relevant features to support receiver inference under limited communication resources and adverse channel conditions. For image classification, the usefulness of a feature depends on the other transmitted features and the distortion introduced by the wireless channel. Effective feature prioritization should therefore account for classification performance after transmission of the selected features. This paper proposes a Task-Oriented Feature Selection (\textit{TOFS}) framework and method, which evaluates feature replacements using receiver classification loss. Loss differences confirmed under independent transmission samples provide pairwise ranking supervision for a selector network. The trained selector predicts priorities in a single forward pass. CIFAR-10 simulations demonstrate improved classification accuracy over an importance-based feature selection baseline at the same transmitted feature count and average transmit power. The proposed \textit{TOFS} framework shows 84\% accuracy performance under Rayleigh fading and Gaussian noise, compared with the 68\% performance of a SOTA method.