A JiT-Based Denoising Defense Method Against Adversarial Examples for Radio Signal Automatic Modulation Classification

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) of radio signals is a core technology for spectrum monitoring and electromagnetic situational awareness. Deep neural networks (DNNs) play an important role in this field owing to their powerful feature extraction capabilities and end-to-end learning paradigm. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses serious security challenges to practical deployment. Adversarial training, a common defense, has limitations including poor generalization across attack types and high training costs. Inspired by Just image Transformers (JiT), a diffusion generative model that directly predicts clean images, this paper proposes a JiT-based denoising defense against adversarial examples for radio signal modulation classification. During training, a signal-specific 1D Transformer denoising network is optimized via flow matching to directly predict clean signal samples. It thereby learns a mapping that projects arbitrary examples back onto the low-dimensional manifold of clean signal examples. During inference, arbitrary examples are fed into the trained network and directly projected onto this manifold. This enables denoising defense without prior knowledge of attacks. Experiments on the RML2018.01A dataset were conducted without attack information, using a single empirically selected, fixed denoising start time. Compared with PGD-based adversarial training, the proposed method achieves a relative improvement of at least 20.58% in robust accuracy under PGD attacks. It also achieves a relative improvement of 10.20% in classification accuracy on clean examples. When evaluated against attack types unseen during adversarial training, the proposed method provides stronger defense than adversarial training. In particular, at higher attack strengths, it achieves a relative improvement of at least 39.72% in robust accuracy.