Knowledge Distillation-Driven Semantic NOMA for Image Transmission With Diffusion Model

As a promising 6G enabler beyond conventional bit-level transmission, semantic communication can considerably reduce required bandwidth resources, while its combination with multiple access requires further exploration. This paper proposes a knowledge distillation-driven and diffusion-enhanced (KDD) semantic non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), named KDD-SemNOMA, for multi-user uplink wireless image transmission. Specifically, to ensure robust feature transmission across diverse transmission conditions, we firstly develop a ConvNeXt-based deep joint source and channel coding architecture with enhanced adaptive feature module. This module incorporates signal-to-noise ratio and channel state information to dynamically adapt to additive white Gaussian noise and Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, to improve image restoration quality without inference overhead, we introduce a two-stage knowledge distillation strategy, i.e., a teacher model, trained on interference-free orthogonal transmission, guides a student model via feature affinity distillation and cross-head prediction distillation. Moreover, a diffusion model-based refinement stage leverages generative priors to transform initial SemNOMA outputs into high-fidelity images with enhanced perceptual quality. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and FFHQ-256 datasets demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, delivering satisfactory reconstruction performance even at extremely poor channel conditions. These results highlight the advantages in both pixel-level accuracy and perceptual metrics, effectively mitigating interference and enabling high-quality image recovery.