arXiv:2611.13238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In remote inference, edge devices transmit high-resolution images over wireless links to a receiver, where an artificial intelligence (AI) model answers task-specific questions about these images to enable reliable decisions. These answers are often determined by a small set of task-causal pixels, such as those of text, whose corruption changes the answer, so these pixels must be delivered with high fidelity. Conventional transmission protects every pixel equally, so it either consumes many resource elements (REs) or corrupts these regions at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To overcome these limitations, in this paper, a zero-shot, domain-agnostic framework, termed semantic-criticality tiered allocation of resources (STAR), is proposed. In particular, a per-pixel semantic-criticality indicator (SCI) is derived from the attention of a frozen vision-language model, so new tasks and domains are handled by changing only the prompt, without retraining. The resulting task causality-aware resource allocation problem over protection tiers is solved exactly by a threshold rule on the SCI, realized by a coded tier for the task-causal pixels and an uncoded, downsampled base layer for the full image. Simulations over a 5G New Radio link demonstrate that STAR attains a semantic accuracy of at least 0.98 for $E_s/N_0 \geq -4$ dB and, at comparable semantic reliability, reduces the REs of robust coded transmission by 59.5% and 91.5% on factory- and vehicle-monitoring datasets, respectively, the latter without any change to the models. Although a deep joint source-channel coding baseline uses fewer REs at comparable semantic accuracy, it must be retrained with labeled data for every new task or domain.