AirPASS: Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems

arXiv:2607.06768v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates over-the-air federated learning (AirFL) in wireless systems where the access point is equipped with a multi-waveguide pinching antenna system (PASS). We adopt the widely studied learning-oriented AirFL formulation, which seeks to maximize the number of selected devices while keeping the aggregation distortion below a prescribed threshold. The resulting joint optimization of device selection, receive beamforming, and pinching-antenna placement is highly nonconvex due to the intricate coupling among these system variables. To address this challenge, we develop AirPASS, an alternating optimization framework with two main components: a homotopy-Riemannian margin-consolidation method for device selection and receive beamforming under a fixed PASS configuration, and a homotopy-assisted geometry optimization method for updating the pinching-antenna positions under fixed selected devices and beamformer.