AeroLat: Channel-Aware Latent Space Semantic Communication for Decentralized UAV Swarms

Abstract

Communication in latent space offers an intriguing alternative to symbolic messages for decentralized autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms operating over bandwidth-constrained, time-varying wireless links. However, when homogeneous frozen models are prompted with discretized perceptual inputs, their broadcast states collapse toward the shared prompt template. In view of this, we propose AeroLat, a channel-aware latent semantic communication framework that uses evidence injection. The resulting latent states are then passed through an explicit communication model that encompasses bandwidth-limited serialization, additive noise and information staleness, which facilitates a joint assessment of communication fidelity and swarm-level coordination. Across multi-seed simulations, AeroLat provably remains resilient to codec choice, faults and increasing swarm size. It consistently reproduces the latent-swarm anomaly, while no-whitening controls recover the collapse. In particular, AeroLat is capable of reducing false similarity by 97.5%.