Observational analysis uncovers the effectiveness of mutual information for enhancing task-oriented communication, suggesting a unified design approach.
Mutual information (MI)-based guidelines have recently proven to be effective for designing task-oriented communication systems, where the ultimate goal is to extract and transmit task-relevant information for downstream tasks. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of MI-empowered task-oriented communication, highlighting how MI-based methods can serve as a unifying design framework in various task-oriented communication scenarios. We begin with the roadmap of MI for designing task-oriented communication systems, and then introduce the roles and applications of MI to guide feature encoding, transmission optimization, and efficient training with two case studies. We further provide a deeper examination of the limitations and challenges associated with MI-based methods. Lastly, we highlight several open issues in MI-based task-oriented communication to inspire future research.
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Li et al. (2026) studied this question.
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