Prof. Zheng Yang

Tsinghua University, China

Abstract

Wireless sensing is a technique that leverages ubiquitous radio frequency (RF) signals (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G) to achieve environmental perception. By analyzing multipath signal propagation, it captures environmental dynamics, and has emerged as a promising sensing modality beyond vision. Over the past decade, wireless sensing has evolved from geometry-based physical modeling to DNN-based discriminative learning methods, improving perception accuracy and granularity. However, existing approaches still rely on supervised learning and struggle to model the underlying probabilistic structure of RF signals across environments, limiting their ability to generalize across scenarios. The emergence of Generative AI offers new opportunities for wireless sensing. By learning the mapping between physical and signal spaces, generative models can build a cognitive understanding of the physical world from a wireless perspective, enabling prediction and reconstruction of environmental states from signal observations. This talk will present recent advances of Generative AI in wireless sensing, covering RF-oriented generative diffusion model and generative cross-modal representation learning, and discuss their key roles across three levels: feature learning, algorithm design, and data generation. This talk will outline a prospective vision toward a wireless sensing foundation model and discuss its potential impact on future sensing systems.

Biography

Zheng Yang is an associate professor in School of Software, Tsinghua University, China. He received his B.E. degree in the Department of Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

His research interests include Internet of Things, sensing and positioning, AI edge computing, etc. Ongoing projects include Widar (WiFi sensing), Ziggo (Time-Sensitive Networking), MoSen (mm-level optical positioning), etc. He is an author and co-author of 4 books and over 120 research papers in premier journals and conferences. He has over 17,000 citations with H-index 65.

He has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE TMC/ACM IMWUT, and PC member of IEEE INFOCOM/ICDCS. He is an IEEE Fellow.