From Semantic to Token Communication: The Next Paradigm for Large-Model-Driven 6G Intelligent Connectivity

Authors:Yu Ma, Zhen Gao, Li Qiao, Xiaoyuan Zhang, Mahdi Boloursaz Mashhadi, Yin Xu, Wenjun Xu, Xiaodong Xu, Kaibin Huang, Jiangzhou Wang, Rahim Tafazolli, Sheng Chen, Tony Q. S. Quek, Ping Zhang

Abstract:The ambitious requirements of sixth-generation (6G) networks are driving communication systems from reliable bit delivery toward meaning-aware and task-oriented connectivity. Large models (LMs), with strong multimodal understanding and generation capabilities, have accelerated this shift and made semantic communication (SemCom) increasingly practical. Yet current LM-driven SemCom remains fragmented: semantic representations are typically tied to specific modalities, models, or tasks. While the bit provides a universal unit for digital transport, there is still no analogous unit for representing and processing semantics, which limits interoperability, theoretical unification, and scalable system design. We argue that tokens provide a natural candidate for this missing abstraction. Two trends support this: unified multimodal LMs now encode text, images, audio, video, and robot actions in one token space, while distributed LM inference already generates substantial token-level traffic through expert routing, cache transfer, and speculative decoding. Token communication (TokenCom) emerges by unifying these trends, using the LM's native processing unit as a communication abstraction above the bit level and enabling importance assignment, error handling, and resource allocation directly at token granularity. This survey traces the evolution from LM-driven SemCom to TokenCom. We review three major directions of LM-driven SemCom: source-centric semantic coding, channel semantics for physical-layer tasks, and collaborative edge-device intelligence. We then examine the token abstraction, the transmission techniques it requires, and two emerging paradigms, namely TokenCom for LM services and for embodied and agentic intelligence. Finally, we identify open challenges toward unified, scalable, and AI-native 6G communication systems.

39 pages, 10 figures, 10 tables, 182 references. Submitted to Science China Information Sciences

Signal Processing (eess.SP); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

C.2.1; E.4; I.2.6

arXiv:2609.10714 [eess.SP]

(or arXiv:2609.10714v1 [eess.SP] for this version)