TONIC: Token-Centric Semantic Communication for Task-Oriented Wireless Systems

ArXi:2605.21553v1 Announce Type: new Tokens are becoming the basic units through which foundation models represent and process information for understanding and inference. However, traditional wireless communication, centered on bit-level fidelity, faces a mismatch between what is transmitted reliably and what downstream models actually consume. This mismatch calls for a communication design that directly accounts for token-level task relevance and downstream model requirements, rather than treating all transmitted bits as equally important.