Seeing Through WiFi: Lightweight Human Pose Estimation with Dynamic Kernel Attention

Human pose estimation (HPE) utilizing wireless WiFi signals has emerged as a promising technology owing to its device-free nature, privacy preservation, and robustness against occlusion and poor lighting. However, existing methods often overlook the physical complex phase information of WiFi signals and fail to generalize across diverse environments due to severe domain shifts. In this paper, we present C-MambaPose, a physics-informed complex-valued Mamba-GraFormer hybrid framework for robust cross-environment WiFi-based 3D HPE. Our framework first sanitizes raw WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) phase errors and constructs a phase-preserving complex-valued representation. We then employ a Spatiotemporal Complex Mamba encoder with a dynamic selective receptive field to capture fine-grained phase dynamics. A cross-attention joint-query mapper maps the unstructured sequence tokens to human joints, which are decoded by a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict anatomically coherent 3D coordinates. Extensive evaluations on the MM-Fi dataset show that C-MambaPose achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art baselines across all settings, setting a new state-of-the-art specifically on the challenging cross-environment split, requiring only 3.78 M parameters-an 83.1% reduction compared to GraphPose-Fi~\cite{chen2026graph} and an 85.7% reduction compared to MetaFi++\cite{zhou2023metafi++}, while maintaining a comparable size to DT-Pose\cite{chen2025towards} (which is only 18% smaller) but achieving significantly superior performance without requiring any pretraining. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/phucngvinuni/cmampose.git.

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) enables privacy-preserving human pose sensing in camera-denied environments, but existing WiFi-based pose estimators often fail under environment shifts and rely on costly camera-based annotation pipelines that limit scale. We propose WiFi-JEPA, a self-supervised framework that learns CSI-native representations by predicting masked latent embeddings instead of reconstructing raw CSI signals that may contain hardware-specific artifacts. WiFi-JEPA makes three contributions: (i) CSI-specific tokenization and link masking tailored to the CSI tensor over channel, time, and link (C,T,L); masking entire Tx-Rx antenna links forces the model to predict one spatial link view from others, capturing cross-link correlations informative of 3D spatial structure. (ii) A ray-tracing CSI simulation pipeline that generates diverse unlabeled CSI from randomized geometric primitives, providing scalable pre-training data without pose annotations. (iii) State-of-the-art results on Person-in-WiFi-3D: WiFi-JEPA outperforms prior WiFi-CSI baselines on both single- and multi-person 3D pose estimation under the same evaluation protocol. We also show that simulated CSI provides complementary pre-training signal to real CSI, and that four vision-native SSL objectives degrade performance below training from scratch, whereas WiFi-JEPA consistently improves downstream pose estimation.

Device-free 3D human pose estimation using commodity WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) enables privacy-preserving and illumination-robust human sensing, but its deployment is limited by poor cross-environment generalization. Unlike images, CSI measurements do not have a spatially localized correspondence to body parts and are heavily affected by multipath propagation, causing models that regress absolute poses to entangle body structure with environment-specific location cues. Within a single environment this coupling is benign: an end-to-end absolute-pose variant, RePos-D, already achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on Person-in-WiFi-3D (86.9 mm MPJPE, a 3.4% gain over the previous best WiFi method, DT-Pose). Across environments, however, the same model overfits position and suffers significant performance degradation. We therefore propose RePos, a factorized framework that separates root-relative pose estimation from root localization. By preventing absolute-pose supervision from affecting the structure branch, RePos learns environment-invariant pose representations. Specifically, it groups CSI features into body-part-aware latent tokens that skeleton-guided modeling refines into the pose, while a separate amplitude-based network estimates the root position through a differentiable spatial-decomposition module. Under the strict MM-Fi cross-environment protocol, RePos achieves MPJPEs of 254.4-296.1 mm, a 10-21% reduction over existing WiFi-based methods. The improvement remains consistent across activity protocols, leave-one-environment-out splits, and leakage-free few-shot transfer. Analysis of the learned features shows that relative-pose representations remain largely position-agnostic, while root localization retains environment dependence, indicating distinct generalization behavior for structure and localization.