Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. A user equipment (UE) may transmit first control information that is indicative of noise (e.g., phase noise, additive white gaussian noise (AWGN), or both) that impacts a spectral efficiency of a modulation and coding scheme (MCS). The MCS may be associated with a constellation of points that may be each representative of a respective candidate sequence of bit values encoded with a corresponding combination of signal amplitude and carrier phase. The UE may receive, based on transmitting the first control information, second control information that indicates a set of partitioning parameters indicative of a hierarchical partitioning of the constellation into a multiple subsets of points. As such, the UE may decode a message, modulated via the MCS, using the hierarchical partitioning indicated by the set of partitioning parameters.