Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Hardware-Impaired Communication Systems: Towards Wireless Generative AI

Thanks to the outstanding achievements from state-of-the-art generative models like ChatGPT and diffusion models, generative AI has gained substantial attention across various industrial and academic domains. In this paper, denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) are proposed for a practical finite-precision wireless communication system with hardware-impaired transceivers. The intuition behind DDPM is to decompose the data generation process over the so-called "denoising" steps. Inspired by this, a DDPM-based receiver is proposed for a practical wireless communication scheme that faces realistic non-idealities, including hardware impairments (HWI), channel distortions, and quantization errors. It is shown that our approach provides network resilience under low-SNR regimes, near-invariant reconstruction performance with respect to different HWI levels and quantization errors, and robust out-of-distribution performance against non-Gaussian noise. Moreover, the reconstruction performance of our scheme is evaluated in terms of cosine similarity and mean-squared error (MSE), highlighting more than 25 dB improvement compared to the conventional deep neural network (DNN)-based receivers.