Greedy and Transformer-Based Multi-Port Selection for Slow Fluid Antenna Multiple Access

arXiv cs.AI / 4/7/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper studies the port-selection problem in fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) systems that use multi-port fluid antenna (FA) receivers.
  • It proposes a greedy forward-selection strategy with swap refinement (GFwd+S) that delivers consistently higher spectral efficiency than existing reference methods.
  • It also introduces a Transformer-based neural approach trained with imitation learning and then refined using a reinforcement learning policy-gradient stage.
  • The Transformer pipeline is designed to achieve performance close to GFwd+S while reducing computational cost, addressing the high-cost vs. low-performance tradeoff in prior work.

Abstract

We address the port-selection problem in fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) systems with multi-port fluid antenna (FA) receivers. Existing methods either achieve near-optimal spectral efficiency (SE) at prohibitive computational cost or sacrifice significant performance for lower complexity. We propose two complementary strategies: (i) GFwd+S, a greedy forward-selection method with swap refinement that consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reference schemes in terms of SE, and (ii) a Transformer-based neural network trained via imitation learning followed by a Reinforce policy-gradient stage, which approaches GFwd+S performance at lower computational cost.