Abstract--Data-intensive Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications at the network edge demand a fundamental shift in Radio Access Network (RAN) design, from merely consuming AI for network optimization, to actively enabling distributed AI workloads. This presents a significant opportunity for network operators to monetize AI while leveraging existing infrastructure. T o realize this vision, this article presents a novel converged O-RAN and AI-RAN architecture for unified orchestration and management of telecommunications and AI workloads on shared infrastructure. The proposed architecture extends the Open RAN principles of modularity, disaggregation, and cloud-nativeness to support heterogeneous AI deployments. We introduce two key architectural innovations: (i) the AI-RAN Orchestrator, which extends the O-RAN Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) to enable integrated resource and allocation across RAN and AI workloads; and (ii) AI-RAN sites that provide distributed edge AI platforms with real-time processing capabilities. The proposed architecture enables flexible orchestration, meeting requirements for managing heterogeneous workloads at different time scales while maintaining open, standardized interfaces and multi-vendor interoperability.This paper has been submitted to IEEE for publication. M. Polese, L. Bonati, and T. Melodia are with the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. This article is based upon work partially supported by the NTIA PWSCIF under A ward No. 25-60-IF054, the U.S. NSF under award CNS-2112471, and by OUSD(R&E) through Army Research Laboratory Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-24-2-0065.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-native radio access networks (RANs) will serve vertical industries with stringent requirements: smart grids, autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, industrial automation, etc. To achieve these requirements, modern 5G/6G design increasingly leverage AI for network optimization, but the opacity of AI decisions poses risks in mission-critical domains. These use cases are often delivered via non-public networks (NPNs) or dedicated network slices, where reliability and safety are vital. In this paper, we motivate the need for transparent and trustworthy AI in high-stakes communications (e.g., healthcare, industrial automation, and robotics) by drawing on 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP)'s vision for non-public networks. We design a mathematical framework to model the trade-offs between transparency (explanation fidelity and fairness), latency, and graphics processing unit (GPU) utilization in deploying explainable AI (XAI) models. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our proposed hybrid XAI model xAI-Native, consistently surpasses conventional baseline models in performance.

With the rapid growth of image and video data on the web, hashing has been extensively studied for image or video search in recent years. Benefiting from recent advances in deep learning, deep hashing methods have achieved promising results for image retrieval. However, there are some limitations of previous deep hashing methods (e.g., the semantic information is not fully exploited). In this paper, we develop a deep supervised discrete hashing algorithm based on the assumption that the learned binary codes should be ideal for classification. Both the pairwise label information and the classification information are used to learn the hash codes within one stream framework. We constrain the outputs of the last layer to be binary codes directly, which is rarely investigated in deep hashing algorithm. Because of the discrete nature of hash codes, an alternating minimization method is used to optimize the objective function. Experimental results have shown that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Split computing distributes deep neural network inference between resource-constrained edge devices and cloud servers but faces significant communication bottlenecks when transmitting intermediate features. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight compression framework that leverages Range Asymmetric Numeral Systems (rANS) encoding with asymmetric integer quantization and sparse tensor representation to reduce transmission overhead dramatically. Specifically, our approach combines asymmetric integer quantization with a sparse representation technique, eliminating the need for complex probability modeling or network modifications. The key contributions include: (1) a distribution-agnostic compression pipeline that exploits inherent tensor sparsity to achieve bandwidth reduction with minimal computational overhead; (2) an approximate theoretical model that optimizes tensor reshaping dimensions to maximize compression efficiency; and (3) a GPU-accelerated implementation with sub-millisecond encoding/decoding latency. Extensive evaluations across diverse neural architectures (ResNet, VGG16, MobileNetV2, SwinT, DenseNet121, EfficientNetB0) demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently maintains near-baseline accuracy across CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks. Moreover, we validated the framework's effectiveness on advanced natural language processing tasks by employing Llama2 7B and 13B on standard benchmarks such as MMLU, HellaSwag, ARC, PIQA, Winogrande, BoolQ, and OpenBookQA, demonstrating its broad applicability beyond computer vision. Furthermore, this method addresses a fundamental bottleneck in deploying sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in bandwidth-constrained environments without compromising model performance.

Open RAN introduces a flexible, cloud-based architecture for the Radio Access Network (RAN), enabling Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML)-driven automation across heterogeneous, multi-vendor deployments. While EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) helps mitigate the opacity of AI models, explainability alone does not guarantee reliable network operations. In this article, we propose a lightweight verification approach based on interpretable models to validate the behavior of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents for RAN slicing and scheduling in Open RAN. Specifically, we use Decision Tree (DT)-based verifiers to perform near-real-time consistency checks at runtime, which would be otherwise unfeasible with computationally expensive state-of-the-art verifiers. We analyze the landscape of XAI and AI verification, propose a scalable architectural integration, and demonstrate feasibility with a DT-based slice-verifier. We also outline future challenges to ensure trustworthy AI adoption in Open RAN.

We show the proof of Proposition 3.7 for a two layer Representation equivalent Neural Operator. The first equality simply follows by the definition of ReNO. A.2 Proof of Remark 3.5 We keep the notation as in Section 3.2. By equation (A.1) we readily obtain T B.1 Fourier layer in FNOs We focus here on the Fourier layer of FNOs, i.e. However, as pointed out in 4, the pointwise activation function applied to a bandlimited input will not necessarily respect the bandwidth.

The Transformer architecture has emerged as a landmark advancement within the broad field of artificial intelligence, effectively catalyzing the advent of large language models (LLMs). However, despite its remarkable capabilities and the substantial progress it has facilitated, the Transformer architecture still has some limitations. One such intrinsic limitation is its inability to effectively capture the Chomsky hierarchy, such as regular expressions or deterministic context-free grammars. Drawing inspiration from pushdown automata, which efficiently resolve deterministic context-free grammars using stacks, we propose StackTrans to address the aforementioned issue within LLMs. Unlike previous approaches that modify the attention computation, StackTrans explicitly incorporates hidden state stacks between Transformer layers. This design maintains compatibility with existing frameworks like flash-attention. Specifically, our design features stack operations -- such as pushing and popping hidden states -- that are differentiable and can be learned in an end-to-end manner. Our comprehensive evaluation spans benchmarks for both Chomsky hierarchies and large-scale natural languages. Across these diverse tasks, StackTrans consistently outperforms standard Transformer models and other baselines. We have successfully scaled StackTrans up from 360M to 7B parameters. In particular, our from-scratch pretrained model StackTrans-360M outperforms several larger open-source LLMs with 2-3x more parameters, showcasing its superior efficiency and reasoning capability.

The combination of higher-order theories and fuzzy logic can be useful in decision-making tasks that involve reasoning across abstract functions and predicates, where exact matches are often rare or unnecessary. Developing efficient reasoning and computational techniques for such a combined formalism presents a significant challenge. In this paper, we adopt a more straightforward approach aiming at integrating two well-established and computationally well-behaved components: higher-order patterns on one side and fuzzy equivalences expressed through similarity relations based on minimum T-norm on the other. We propose a unification algorithm for higher-order patterns modulo these similarity relations and prove its termination, soundness, and completeness. This unification problem, like its crisp counterpart, is unitary. The algorithm computes a most general unifier with the highest degree of approximation when the given terms are unifiable.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) has become the most certain and prominent feature of 6G mobile networks. Unlike 5G, where AI/ML was not natively integrated but rather an add-on feature over existing architecture, 6G shall incorporate AI from the onset to address its complexity and support ubiquitous AI applications. Based on our extensive mobile network operation and standardization experience from 2G to 5G, this paper explores the design and standardization principles of AI-Native radio access networks (RAN) for 6G, with a particular focus on its critical Day 1 architecture, functionalities and capabilities. We investigate the framework of AI-Native RAN and present its three essential capabilities to shed some light on the standardization direction; namely, AI-driven RAN processing/optimization/automation, reliable AI lifecycle management (LCM), and AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) provisioning. The standardization of AI-Native RAN, in particular the Day 1 features, including an AI-Native 6G RAN architecture, were proposed. For validation, a large-scale field trial with over 5000 5G-A base stations have been built and delivered significant improvements in average air interface latency, root cause identification, and network energy consumption with the proposed architecture and the supporting AI functions. This paper aims to provide a Day 1 framework for 6G AI-Native RAN standardization design, balancing technical innovation with practical deployment.