CSI Compression Beyond Latents: End-to-End Hybrid Attention-CNN Networks with Entropy Regularization

Abstract

Massive MIMO systems rely on accurate Channel State Information (CSI) feedback to enable high-gain beam-forming. However, the feedback overhead scales linearly with the number of antennas, presenting a major bottleneck. While recent deep learning methods have improved CSI compression, most overlook the impact of quantization and entropy coding, limiting their practical deployability. In this work, we propose an end-to-end CSI compression framework that integrates a Spatial Correlation-Guided Attention Mechanism with quantization and entropy-aware training. Our model effectively exploits the spatial correlation among the antennas, thereby learning compact, entropy-optimized latent representations for efficient coding. This reduces the required feedback bitrates without sacrificing reconstruction accuracy, thereby yielding a superior rate-distortion trade-off. Experiments show that our method surpasses existing end-to-end CSI compression schemes, exceeding benchmark performance by an average of 21.5% on indoor datasets and 18.9% on outdoor datasets. The proposed framework results in a practical and efficient CSI feedback scheme.