As an evolving successor to the mobile Internet, the Metaverse creates the impression of an immersive environment, integrating the virtual as well as the real world. In contrast to the traditional mobile Internet based on servers, the Metaverse is constructed by billions of cooperating users by harnessing their smart edge devices having limited communication and computation resources. In this immersive environment an unprecedented amount of multi-modal data has to be processed. To circumvent this impending bottleneck, low-rate semantic communication might be harnessed in support of the Metaverse. But given that private multi-modal data is exchanged in the Metaverse, we have to guard against security breaches and privacy invasions. Hence we conceive a trust-worthy semantic communication system for the Metaverse based on a federated learning architecture by exploiting its distributed decision-making and privacy-preserving capability. We conclude by identifying a suite of promising research directions and open issues.

翻译：作为移动互联网的演进继承者，元宇宙通过整合虚拟与现实世界，营造出沉浸式环境的体验。与基于服务器的传统移动互联网不同，元宇宙通过利用数十亿合作用户拥有的通信与计算资源受限的智能边缘设备构建而成。在这个沉浸式环境中，需要处理前所未有的多模态数据量。为规避这一迫在眉睫的瓶颈，可借助低速率语义通信来支持元宇宙。但由于元宇宙中需交换私密的多模态数据，我们必须防范安全漏洞和隐私侵犯。因此，我们基于联邦学习架构，利用其分布式决策与隐私保护能力，设计了一种面向元宇宙的可信语义通信系统。最后，我们总结了一系列具有前景的研究方向与待解决的公开问题。