cs.ITAug 19, 2026

GCNO: Gramian Chebyshev Neural Operator for Physics-Based Compression of Wireless Channels

Authors: Rafid Umayer Murshed, Shahab Hamidi-Rad, Elahe Soltanaghai, Akshay Malhotra

Organizations: Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · InterDigital AI Lab

Abstract

Large antenna arrays allow wireless systems to serve more users and achieve higher data rates, but they also make channel feedback expensive: the receiving device must repeatedly report a large complex-valued channel matrix to the base station. Most neural compressors treat this matrix like an image and replace it with a fixed-length code that only a matched neural decoder can interpret. The message therefore does not adapt to channel complexity, and changing the antenna count typically requires retraining. We ask whether a device can instead report only the few dominant propagation paths underlying each channel. We introduce the Gramian Chebyshev Neural Operator (GCNO), a physics-based, variable-rate compressor that identifies a sample-dependent set of path directions. GCNO uses receive-transmit channel structure to locate paths, a first-order Taylor correction to refine directions that fall between grid points, and least squares to recover their complex strengths. It is trained without path labels, and the base station reconstructs the channel analytically from the transmitted path tuples rather than through a learned decoder. Across three ray-traced environments, GCNO achieves better reconstruction accuracy at the same payload - or lower payload at the same accuracy - than neural feedback baselines, and transfers to unseen antenna counts without retraining.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables19 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Jun 26, 2026

Contrastive Predictive Coding with Compression for Enhanced Channel State Feedback in Wireless Networks

Accurate and timely channel state information (CSI) is essential for next-generation wireless systems, yet existing works treat CSI compression and CSI prediction as separate problems, both in academia and in current 3GPP studies. Consequently, channel aging remains insufficiently addressed within standardized CSI feedback pipelines. In this article, we propose a unified compression-prediction framework that integrates Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) directly into the 3GPP-compliant CSI compression architecture. Instead of predicting high-dimensional CSI matrices, our approach forecasts future latent representations and jointly optimizes reconstruction fidelity and temporal predictive coherence via a combined 1-SGCS and InfoNCE objective. This design enables temporal representation learning without increasing feedback overhead. We present two variants: CPC-before-Compression, which performs autoregressive modeling on encoded features prior to quantization, and CPC-after-Compression, which shifts temporal modeling to the base-station to reduce the complexity of users' devices. Evaluations on 3GPP-compliant datasets from Nokia, Oppo, and CATT show that CPC-before-Compression achieves over 90% reconstruction accuracy with 32x lower decoder GFLOPs than the 3GPP baseline, while CPC-after-Compression preserves an identical encoder footprint and the same 64-bit feedback overhead. By unifying compression and prediction within a standardized pipeline, the proposed framework provides an age-aware, computationally efficient CSI feedback solution. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/AhmedRadwan02/cpc-3gpp
Aug 24, 2026

WiNeRF: Measurement Constrained Radiance Fields for Actionable Wireless Channel Modeling

Wireless embedded systems increasingly rely on wireless channel information for decision making, yet practical platforms operate under severe constraints, including few antennas, narrow bandwidth, and sparse, noisy measurements. While neural field based approaches inspired by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently been explored for continuous wireless channel modeling, existing approaches depend on dense measurements or external priors such as known geometry, visual context, or angle-of-arrival (AoA) information, limiting their practicality in real-world deployments. We present WiNeRF, a neural field framework that learns a spatially continuous, complex-valued wireless channel representation directly from sparse channel state information (CSI) collected by commodity WiFi devices. WiNeRF embeds intrinsic system constraints, such as antenna geometry, limited spatial resolution, and phase uncertainty, as inductive biases through a 3D conical wave sampling model, a multi-resolution implicit scene representation, and a differentiable optimization framework for complex-valued channel learning. Across diverse indoor environments with non-line-of-sight (NLoS) regions, WiNeRF achieves a median prediction SNR of 5.3 dB, outperforming prior neural baselines by 4.9 dB on average (approximately 3x higher prediction SNR), and produces a task-agnostic channel representation that can be directly reused in standard signal-processing pipelines, including beamforming, AoA estimation, and RSSI coverage mapping, without modifying existing hardware or wireless protocols.
Jun 15, 2026

Context-Aware Markov VAE for CSI Compression in Wireless Systems

This paper considers neural channel state information (CSI) compression for time-varying massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with limited feedback resources. The main challenge lies in obtaining a compact and efficient representation of the CSI given that it exhibits strong temporal correlation across successive snapshots. Existing memoryless compression models do not exploit this property, while simple temporal extensions often incorporate multiple observations without explicitly modeling the latent dynamics. We propose a context-aware compression framework based on a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder (k-MMVAE), which uses a finite temporal window to capture the evolution of CSI in the latent space. The model introduces Markov-structured latent dynamics with finite memory, enabling efficient use of temporal dependencies for compression. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves target CSI reconstruction performance compared to memoryless and weakly sequential baselines, particularly at low and moderate compression rates. These results suggest that explicit latent temporal modeling can provide an effective mechanism for CSI compression under limited feedback constraints.