cs.NIApr 2, 2026

Physics-Informed Transformer for Multi-Band Channel Frequency Response Reconstruction

Authors: Anatolij Zubow, Joana Angjo, Sigrid Dimce, Falko Dressler

Organizations: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Abstract

Wideband channel frequency response (CFR) estimation is challenging in multi-band wireless systems, especially when one or more sub-bands are temporarily blocked by co-channel interference. We present a physics-informed complex Transformer that reconstructs the full wideband CFR from such fragmented, partially observed spectrum snapshots. The interference pattern in each sub-band is modeled as an independent two-state discrete-time Markov chain, capturing realistic bursty occupancy behavior. Our model operates on the joint time-frequency grid of TT snapshots and FF frequency bins and uses a factored self-attention mechanism that separately attends along both axes, reducing the computational complexity to O(TF2+FT2)O(TF^2 + FT^2). Complex-valued inputs and outputs are processed through a holomorphic linear layer that preserves phase relationships. Training uses a composite physics-informed loss combining spectral fidelity, power delay profile (PDP) reconstruction, channel impulse response (CIR) sparsity, and temporal smoothness. Mobility effects are incorporated through per-sample velocity randomization, enabling generalization across different mobility regimes. Evaluation against three classical baselines, namely, last-observation-carry-forward, zero-fill, and cubic-spline interpolation, shows that our approach achieves the highest PDP similarity with respect to the ground truth, reaching ρ≥0.82ρ\geq 0.82 compared to ρ≥0.62ρ\geq 0.62 for the best baseline at interference occupancy levels up to 50%. Furthermore, the model degrades smoothly across the full velocity range, consistently outperforming all other baselines.

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