Jiawen Kang
Publications
From Digital Twins to World Models:Opportunities, Challenges, and Applications for Mobile Edge General Intelligence
The rapid evolution toward 6G and beyond communication systems is accelerating the convergence of digital twins and world models at the network edge. Traditional digital twins provide high-fidelity representations of physical systems and support monitoring, analysis, and offline optimization. However, in highly dynamic edge environments, they face limitations in autonomy, adaptability, and scalability. This paper presents a systematic survey of the transition from digital twins to world models and discusses its role in enabling edge general intelligence (EGI). First, the paper clarifies the conceptual differences between digital twins and world models and highlights the shift from physics-based, centralized, and system-centric replicas to data-driven, decentralized, and agent-centric internal models. This discussion helps readers gain a clear understanding of how this transition enables more adaptive, autonomous, and resource-efficient intelligence at the network edge. The paper reviews the design principles, architectures, and key components of world models, including perception, latent state representation, dynamics learning, imagination-based planning, and memory. In addition, it examines the integration of world models and digital twins in wireless EGI systems and surveys emerging applications in integrated sensing and communications, semantic communication, air-ground networks, and low-altitude wireless networks. Finally, this survey provides a systematic roadmap and practical insights for designing world-model-driven edge intelligence systems in wireless and edge computing environments. It also outlines key research challenges and future directions toward scalable, reliable, and interoperable world models for edge-native agentic AI.
Efficient Cross-View Localization in 6G Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network
Recently, visual localization has become an important supplement to improve localization reliability, and cross-view approaches can greatly enhance coverage and adaptability. Meanwhile, future 6G will enable a globally covered mobile communication system, with a space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) serving as key supporting architecture. Inspired by this, we explore an integration of cross-view localization (CVL) with 6G SAGIN, thereby enhancing its performance in latency, energy consumption, and privacy protection. First, we provide a comprehensive review of CVL and SAGIN, highlighting their capabilities, integration opportunities, and potential applications. Benefiting from the fast and extensive image collection and transmission capabilities of the 6G SAGIN architecture, CVL achieves higher localization accuracy and faster processing speed. Then, we propose a split-inference framework for implementing CVL, which fully leverages the distributed communication and computing resources of the 6G SAGIN architecture. Subsequently, we conduct joint optimization of communication, computation, and confidentiality within the proposed split-inference framework, aiming to provide a paradigm and a direction for making CVL efficient. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provide solutions to the optimization problem. Finally, we discuss potential research directions for 6G SAGIN-enabled CVL.
Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Network Optimization
Enhancing future wireless networks presents a significant challenge for networking systems due to diverse user demands and the emergence of 6G technology. While reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework, it often encounters difficulties with high-dimensional state spaces and complex environments, leading to substantial computational demands, distributed intelligence, and potentially inconsistent outcomes. Large language models (LLMs), with their extensive pretrained knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities, offer promising tools to enhance RL in optimizing 6G wireless networks. We explore RL models augmented by LLMs, emphasizing their roles and the potential benefits of their synergy in wireless network optimization. We then examine LLM-enabled RL across various protocol layers: physical, data link, network, transport, and application layers. Additionally, we propose an LLM-assisted state representation and semantic extraction to enhance the multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. This approach is applied to service migration and request routing, as well as topology graph generation in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite networks. Through case studies, we demonstrate that our framework effectively performs optimization of wireless network. Finally, we outline prospective research directions for LLM-enabled RL in wireless network optimization.