A JEPA-Based Field-Layer World Model for Bridging Channel Prediction and Estimation

Abstract

Channel state information (CSI) acquisition, reconstruction, and prediction are fundamental yet costly tasks in modern MIMO-OFDM wireless systems. Direct coefficient-level prediction of raw CSI is fragile in realistic propagation environments, since small spatial perturbations, local scattering changes, and phase variations can cause large errors in the complex channel domain. However, the underlying wireless propagation field still contains stable and predictable structures that can be exploited across time, frequency, antenna, and carrier dimensions. Motivated by this observation, we propose a JEPA-based field-layer world model (FWM) that learns a shared latent propagation state from multi-resolution CSI observations across the considered carrier bands and predicts its task-relevant evolution in the latent domain. The proposed FWM maps multiple CSI observation resolutions to a shared latent propagation-field space through scale-specific tokenizer heads. A latent prediction backbone is then trained to infer masked or future field states, while an incremental multi-scale alignment strategy allows new observation scales to be incorporated without retraining the entire model from scratch. For downstream reconstruction, the predicted latent field is used as a structured prior and combined with sparse current pilots. Experiments on single-band and cross-band reconstruction demonstrate improved symbol detection and, more notably, substantial beamforming gains despite modest NMSE improvements, indicating that FWM captures task-relevant spatial propagation structure beyond coefficient-wise CSI fitting.