CSI-JEPA: Towards Foundation Representations for Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Sensing with Minimal Supervision

Abstract

Channel state information (CSI) provides a widely available sensing modality for human and environment perception, but existing CSI sensing models usually rely on task-specific supervised training and require substantial labeled data for each task, device, user, or environment. This limits their scalability in practical deployments where unlabeled CSI is abundant but labeled data is costly to collect. In this paper, we present CSI-JEPA, a self-supervised predictive representation learning framework for label-efficient and transferable Wi-Fi sensing. CSI-JEPA learns reusable temporal-spectral representations from unlabeled CSI samples by predicting latent features of masked channel regions from visible context. To better match the physical structure of CSI, it jointly tokenizes CSI along the time and subcarrier dimensions and introduces a channel variation-aware masking strategy that prioritizes regions with stronger local channel dynamics. After pretraining, the encoder is frozen and adapted to downstream sensing tasks using lightweight task-specific adapters. We evaluate CSI-JEPA on seven real-world Wi-Fi sensing tasks spanning diverse objectives and deployment settings. The results show that CSI-JEPA improves downstream sensing performance over competitive baselines, achieving up to 10.64 percentage points (pp) mean accuracy gain over the supervised Transformer and matched-budget label savings of up to 95.0%. Across unseen tasks, environments, hardware platforms, and CSI organizations, frozen CSI-JEPA improves downstream adaptation by up to 22.92 pp over non-pretrained baselines, demonstrating strong representation transferability.