# Hamiltonian-Inspired Attention Mechanism for Scalable RF Transmitter Fingerprinting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30364/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Hamiltonian Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01563/) (2019)
- [Lagrangian Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04630/) (2020)
- [Symplectic Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13334/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Radio Modulation Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04105/) (2016)
- [Orthogonalizing Convolutional Layers with the Cayley Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07167/) (2021)
- [Orthogonal Recurrent Neural Networks with Scaled Cayley Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09520/) (2017)
- [ORACLE: Optimized Radio clAssification through Convolutional neuraL nEtworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01124/) (2018)
- [WiSig: A Large-Scale WiFi Signal Dataset for Receiver and Channel Agnostic RF Fingerprinting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15363/) (2021)
- [Open Set Wireless Transmitter Authorization: Deep Learning Approaches and Dataset Considerations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00954/) (2020)
- [Towards Scalable and Channel-Robust Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification for LoRa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02867/) (2021)
- [GAN-RXA: A Practical Scalable Solution to Receiver-Agnostic Transmitter Fingerprinting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14312/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting identifies wire-less transmitters using hardware-induced imperfections present in baseband I/Q signals. However, deep learning models often degrade under receiver and channel distribution shifts, particularly as transmitter populations grow. This work proposes the Hamiltonian Transformer, a physics-informed attention architecture that enforces norm preserving value dynamics within each attention head using a learned skew-symmetric generator and a St"ormer-Verlet leapfrog integration step. An additional phase-increment embedding exposes oscillator dynamics at the input layer. All experiments use non-equalized raw I/Q signals from the WiSig dataset under four protocols: same-day classification, cross-receiver generalisation, cross-day generalisation, and transmitter scaling up to 150 devices. The Hamiltonian Transformer achieves 99.12% accuracy under same-day conditions and 61.64% at 150 transmitters, consistently outperforming CNN and Transformer baselines across all scale points. A controlled ablation study identifies norm-preservation in the value update as the primary inductive bias driving the scaling advantage, with the phase increment embedding providing the single largest per-component improvement. These results indicate that embedding physics-informed structural priors into attention mechanisms is an effective approach to large-scale transmitter identification on raw wireless signals.