Multi-User Precoding with Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces via Neural Reparameterization

Abstract

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) enable wave-domain signal processing, and provide a promising architecture for enhancing spectral efficiency in multi-user wireless communication systems. However, jointly optimizing transmit power and multi-layer phase shifts in SIM-assisted wireless systems under quality-of-service (QoS) constraints results in a large-scale nonconvex problem, for which conventional numerical optimization-based methods, such as alternating optimization (AO), suffer from high computational burden and limited scalability. In this paper, we develop a QoS constraint-aware neural reparameterization framework for SIM-assisted downlink precoding. By embedding the cascaded wave-propagation structure of the SIM into a model-based differentiable architecture, both the phase shift configuration and transmit power allocation are reparameterized as parameters of a structured neural model that inherently satisfies feasibility constraints of the original problem. The resulting formulation enables efficient optimization that does not rely on a channel-to-precoding mapping learned through offline training. Instead, it directly updates the reparameterized optimization variables to realize real-time precoding for any channel realization. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior sum rate performance under QoS constraints, while significantly improving computational efficiency compared with conventional numerical optimization approaches.