JEPA-Inspired Latent Field Prediction for Sparse-Pilot MIMO-OFDM Channel Reconstruction
Yuzhi Yang, Brahim Mefgouda, Hang Zou, Lina Bariah, Anis Bara, Yuhuan Lu, Hao Zhang, Merouane Debbah
Abstract
Accurate acquisition of full channel state information (CSI) is essential for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) wireless systems, while dense pilot-based estimation incurs substantial overhead. Directly minimizing the prediction error over raw CSI coefficients is fragile in realistic propagation environments, since small-scale fading, mobility, local scattering, and small spatial perturbations can induce large phase-sensitive variations. Nevertheless, wireless channels contain strong spatial, temporal, and frequency-domain correlations that can be more predictably represented in a latent propagation-field domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA)-inspired field world model, defined as a latent predictive model of the wireless propagation field, for sparse-pilot channel reconstruction. The model maps CSI observations into latent time-frequency tokens, predicts masked or future latent field states from historical multi-band context, and fuses the predicted latent prior with sparse noisy current pilots to reconstruct the full MIMO-OFDM channel. Ray-tracing experiments show that the proposed method improves normalized mean square error (NMSE) over pilot-only and direct reconstruction baselines, supporting latent field prediction as an effective prior for sparse-pilot channel acquisition.