English

SiFo: Wireless Foundation Model for Low-Overhead Site-Specific CSI Feedback

Signal Processing 2026-05-18 v1

Abstract

SiFo, a wireless foundation model-based framework, is proposed for low-overhead site-specific channel state information (CSI) feedback. In 3GPP NR, Type-II feedback provides an expressive codebook-based CSI representation, but it requires substantial reference-signal overhead, UE-side search, and feedback. Learning-based site-specific feedback can reduce these online costs while retaining high-quality subspace representation by exploiting deployment-dependent propagation structure. However, existing site-specific designs typically train a dedicated neural network for each new site, which limits scalability when the number of deployments is large. SiFo addresses this scalability issue by pretraining a CSI feedback model across source sites and adapting it to a target site through lightweight calibration. A small set of target-site users reports low-dimensional reference signal received power (RSRP) fingerprints, and their full-CSI-based subspace labels are stored as calibration memory. During online operation, a served user is matched to calibrated users through the same SSB probing and RSRP reporting procedure, so nearby calibration samples provide site-specific subspace guidance without updating model parameters. SiFo therefore transfers common propagation knowledge while retaining local adaptation. Numerical results across ten city scenarios demonstrate that SiFo (i) achieves higher CSI-capture efficiency than separately trained site-specific learning baselines under the same target-site labeled budget, (ii) approaches the high-overhead 3GPP NR Type-II feedback reference using only RSRP measurements collected during online SSB probing, and (iii) converts the high CSI-capture efficiency and low overhead into effective spectral efficiency improvement under limited target-site data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.16141,
  title  = {SiFo: Wireless Foundation Model for Low-Overhead Site-Specific CSI Feedback},
  author = {Cheng-Jie Zhao and Zhaolin Wang and Zongyao Zhao and Yuanwei Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16141},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:14:53.683Z