Channel state information (CSI) prediction forecasts future channel states from historical observations, supporting transceiver design and resource allocation with reduced measurement overhead. However, existing deep learning predictors mainly encode channel knowledge in model parameters, which can limit their ability to represent diverse patterns of channel dynamics across scenes. In this paper, we propose RAG-CSI, a retrieval-enhanced Transformer framework that augments prediction with relevant historical channel knowledge. Specifically, we construct a global--local CSI knowledge store containing representative observations across scenes and historical observations from the current serving scene. We further develop joint state--dynamics retrieval (JSDR), which jointly characterizes channel states, phase dynamics, and amplitude dynamics to retrieve relevant CSI sequences. A Transformer predictor then uses cross-attention to fuse the retrieved knowledge with the current CSI history and predict future CSI with limited additional model parameters. Experiments on a multi-scene CSI dataset show overall improvements exceeding 10% across all five evaluation metrics over the best baseline for each metric, including a 15.42% reduction in normalized mean squared error.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Comparison of conventional and retrieval-augmented CSI prediction frameworks.
Fig. 2 : The overview of the proposed RAG-CSI. The framework consists of JDSR, a Transformer predictor, and CSI reconstruction. JSDR combines CSI states with phase and amplitude dynamics to retrieve relevant sequences from global and local CSI stores, offering historical references for Transformer-based prediction.
Properties
Value
Number of Scenes
10
Number of antennas
8
Antenna array form
ULA
Number of subcarriers
8
Number of paths
25
Carrier frequency
3.5 GHz
TABLE I : Dataset properties and experimental settings.
Method
MSE ↓
NMSE ↓
MAE ↓
NMAE ↓
ρ↑
LSTM [ 8 ]
0.8301
0.7395
0.6883
0.7863
0.7115
LSTM-GRU [ 16 ]
1.1752
1.0031
0.8915
1.0013
0.3614
Transformer [ 9 ]
0.8150
0.7296
0.6765
0.7756
0.6776
RCDNet [ 17 ]
0.8128
0.7396
0.6773
0.7793
0.6982
WiFO [ 12 ]
1.0039
0.8727
0.7941
0.8996
0.5047
PromptFM [ 18 ]
0.9850
0.8602
0.7785
0.8812
0.4131
TABLE II : Overall CSI prediction performance comparison.
Scenes
ASU Campus
New York
Miami
San Diego
Methods
NMSE ↓
NMAE ↓
ρ↑
NMSE ↓
NMAE ↓
ρ↑
NMSE ↓
NMAE ↓
ρ↑
NMSE ↓
NMAE ↓
ρ↑
LSTM [ 8 ]
0.6528
0.7112
0.7904
0.6939
0.7921
0.7299
1.0133
1.0054
0.4542
0.6038
0.7186
0.7240
LSTM-GRU [ 16 ]
1.0043
1.0020
0.2954
0.9995
0.9999
0.3053
1.0008
0.9989
0.6889
1.0006
1.0005
0.3005
Transformer [ 9 ]
0.6745
0.7339
0.7202
0.7778
0.8283
0.6573
0.7586
0.7800
0.6684
0.6466
0.7492
0.6493
RCDNet [ 17 ]
0.7012
0.7462
0.7260
0.7018
0.7826
0.6887
0.8110
0.8394
0.6750
0.6558
0.7490
0.6939
WiFO [ 12 ]
0.8435
0.8713
0.5763
0.8486
0.9016
0.4397
1.0035
1.0016
0.2779
0.7508
0.8319
0.6177
TABLE III: CSI prediction performance across different scenes.
Method
MSE ↓
NMSE ↓
MAE ↓
NMAE ↓
ρ↑
w/o JSDR
0.7910
0.6783
0.6648
0.7563
0.6844
w/o RAG
0.8388
0.7344
0.6970
0.7943
0.6351
RAG-CSI
0.6961
0.6172
0.6051
0.6970
0.7949
TABLE IV : Ablation study of RAG-CSI.
Fig. 3 : Hyperparameter sensitivity: (a) retrieval size K with λ=0.5 ; (b) Global–Local balancing factor λ with K=10 .
Method
Params (M)
Inference Time (ms)
LSTM [ 8 ]
6.435
0.1422
LSTM-GRU [ 16 ]
1.744
0.1718
Transformer [ 9 ]
0.909
0.9457
RCDNet [ 17 ]
4.341
0.3791
WiFO [ 12 ]
21.326
0.4114
PromptFM [ 18 ]
21.598
0.5042
TABLE V : Model size and inference time comparison.
This paper considers channel state information (CSI) prediction using neural networks for time-varying multi-antenna channels from noisy historical observations. The main challenge is to exploit temporal correlation while distinguishing channel evolution from observation noise. We propose JEPA-kMMVAE, which combines a joint-embedding predictive architecture with a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder to predict future CSI through temporally structured latent representations. The framework supports direct prediction and residual corrections relative to the latest latent state and noisy CSI observation. Simulation results show that the residual configuration outperforms the evaluated baselines at moderate and high input CSI signal-to-noise ratios, while sequence baselines remain more accurate under stronger noise.
Ericsson Research, Stockholm, Sweden · Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden · Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Reliable prediction of time-varying channel state information (CSI) is essential for efficient wireless communication. Each CSI frame is a matrix-valued representation of the wireless channel response, and a sequence of CSI frames forms a temporal channel trajectory. Modern deep learning-based CSI predictors, however, often provide only point predictions and lack calibrated uncertainty estimates. This limitation is particularly problematic in multi-step CSI prediction, where the target is a sequence of future CSI matrices, and downstream decisions such as beamforming or scheduling may fail if any part of the predicted trajectory is unreliable. We propose trajectory-adaptive calibration and error profiling with conformal risk control (TRACE-CRC), a method for trajectory-aware uncertainty quantification in multi-step CSI prediction. TRACE-CRC constructs Frobenius-norm uncertainty balls around predicted CSI matrices and controls the risk that at least one future frame is uncovered. Instead of calibrating each future step independently, TRACE-CRC combines future-step-dependent error profiling, trajectory difficulty stratification, and learn-then-test (LTT) risk control. Empirically, TRACE-CRC achieves reliable trajectory-level coverage with substantially smaller uncertainty balls than conservative multi-step corrections, while avoiding the trajectory undercoverage of compact stepwise and adaptive conformal baselines.
Kiarash Rezaei, Mehdi Sattari, Javad Aliakbari +3
Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
Accurate channel state information (CSI) prediction is essential for proactive beamforming and resource management in 5G massive MIMO systems, yet the deployment of high-accuracy transformer-based predictors on base-station hardware remains challenging because the most capable models carry upwards of 30,M parameters. This paper introduces Lightweight PCGAE-Net, which addresses the efficiency problem not by post-hoc compression but by correcting two architectural flaws in the current state of the art. The first is a sequential attention ordering bias: in CS3T-UNet, group-wise temporal attention (GTA) always operates on features that have already been transformed by cross-shaped spatial attention (CSA), distorting what temporal information GTA can capture. We remove this dependency by routing both attention modules to the same layer-normalized input and combining their independent outputs through a learned per-channel sigmoid CrossGate. The second flaw is an uncompressed bottleneck: applying full self-attention at the deepest encoder stage, where channel depth reaches 4C, is quadratically expensive and carries redundant features. A Bottleneck AutoEncoder (BAE) with 1×1 convolutions halves this depth and uses an auxiliary reconstruction loss to prevent information collapse. Wrapping these components inside a shallower encoder-decoder with frequency-domain dimensionality reduction (Nf=32, C=48) produces a model with just 8.54,M parameters -- 58% fewer than the CS3T-UNet baseline -- that outperforms it by up to 3.26,dB at 5,km/h and 6.0,dB at 9,km/h in single-step prediction on QuaDriGa dataset.
Uma Kishore Godavarti, K. Giridhar, Vanani Prince Dharmendrabhai +2
Network Modem Team, Samsung R&D India Bangalore · Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India