HASCom: A Heterogeneous Affective-Semantic Communication Framework for Speech Transmission

Driven by the development of next-generation wireless networks and the widespread adoption of sensing, communication is shifting from traditional bit-level transmission to intelligent, rich interactions within our digital social system. However, existing speech semantic communication frameworks predominantly focus on textual accuracy, neglecting the critical affective information (e.g., tone and emotion) that is essential for natural human-centric interactions in the real world. To address this limitation, we propose the Heterogeneous Affective Speech Semantic Communication (HASCom) framework, designed for the robust transmission of highly expressive speech over complex wireless channels. Specifically, we design a heterogeneous dual-stream transmission architecture that decouples discrete phoneme-level linguistic content from continuous emotional embeddings. For discrete semantic information, we use reliable digital coding protected by Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) to guarantee strict recoverability. Conversely, for emotional features, we employ Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) analog transmission to prevent irreversible quantization errors and the cliff effect. Additionally, we develop a prior-guided diffusion reconstruction module at the receiving end. This module leverages a structural prior network to align the decoded semantics, which then steers the reverse diffusion process conditioned on the recovered affective features. Extensive experiments under both AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels demonstrate that HASCom significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, it achieves superior objective semantic similarity and subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) at low Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs), while the JSCC transmission modules maintain an ultra-low inference latency of less than 0.1 ms, validating its high efficiency and robustness for practical deployments.