Semantic communications, a promising approach for agent-human and agent-agent interactions, typically operate at a feature level, lacking true semantic understanding. This paper explores understanding-level semantic communications (ULSC), transforming visual data into human-intelligible semantic content. We employ an image caption neural network (ICNN) to derive semantic representations from visual data, expressed as natural language descriptions. These are further refined using a pre-trained large language model (LLM) for importance quantification and semantic error correction. The subsequent semantic importance-aware communications (SIAC) aim to minimize semantic loss while respecting transmission delay constraints, exemplified through adaptive modulation and coding strategies. At the receiving end, LLM-based semantic error correction is utilized. If visual data recreation is desired, a pre-trained generative artificial intelligence (AI) model can regenerate it using the corrected descriptions. We assess semantic similarities between transmitted and recovered content, demonstrating ULSC's superior ability to convey semantic understanding compared to feature-level semantic communications (FLSC). ULSC's conversion of visual data to natural language facilitates various cognitive tasks, leveraging human knowledge bases. Additionally, this method enhances privacy, as neither original data nor features are directly transmitted.

In this paper, joint resource allocation and power control for energy efficient device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular networks are investigated. The resource and power are optimized for maximization of the energy efficiency (EE) of D2D communications. Exploiting the properties of fractional programming, we transform the original nonconvex optimization problem in fractional form into an equivalent optimization problem in subtractive form. Then, an efficient iterative resource allocation and power control scheme is proposed. In each iteration, part of the constraints of the EE optimization problem is removed by exploiting the penalty function approach. We further propose a novel two-layer approach which allows to find the optimum at each iteration by decoupling the EE optimization problem of joint resource allocation and power control into two separate steps. In the first layer, the optimal power values are obtained by solving a series of maximization problems through root-finding with or without considering the loss of cellular users' rates. In the second layer, the formulated optimization problem belongs to a classical resource allocation problem with single allocation format which admits a network flow formulation so that it can be solved to optimality. Simulation results demonstrate the remarkable improvements in terms of EE by using the proposed iterative resource allocation and power control scheme.