Joint Source-Channel Noise Adding with Adaptive Denoising for Diffusion-Based Semantic Communications

Abstract: Semantic communication (SemCom) aims to convey the intended meaning of messages rather than merely transmitting bits, thereby offering greater efficiency and robustness, particularly in resource-constrained or noisy environments. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which is referred to as joint source-channel noise adding with adaptive denoising (JSCNA-AD) for SemCom based on a diffusion model (DM). Unlike conventional encoder-decoder designs, our approach intentionally incorporates the channel noise during transmission, effectively transforming the harmful channel noise into a constructive component of the diffusion-based semantic reconstruction process. Besides, we introduce an attention-based adaptive denoising mechanism, in which transmitted images are divided into multiple regions, and the number of denoising steps is dynamically allocated based on the semantic importance of each region. This design effectively balances the reception quality and the inference latency by prioritizing the critical semantic information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing SemCom schemes under various noise conditions, underscoring the potential of diffusion-based models in next-generation communication systems.