ConsisFormer: Compute-Efficient Transformer for Wireless Foundation Models Based on Channel Consistency

Abstract

Wireless foundation models (WFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for AI-native 6G networks, enabling universal channel representations adaptable to diverse communication and sensing tasks. Existing WFMs are predominantly built upon the Transformer architecture, which delivers superior performance but incurs computational complexity proportional to the square of the input sequence length, posing a significant barrier to their deployment under stringent inference latency constraints. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose ConsisFormer, a compute-efficient Transformer design based on short-term consistency of wireless channels, as a WFM backbone. By utilizing the observation that adjacent time or frequency instances share similar clusters of scatterers and thus exhibit similar channel characteristics, we develop an adaptive token aggregation (ATA) module to dynamically merge neighboring channel state information (CSI) tokens, thereby reducing the length of the token sequence involved in self-attention calculations to lower the computational cost. Furthermore, we propose a feature sequence interpolation (FSI) method to recover the full CSI representation based on the sparse feature sequence outputted from the Transformer blocks, thus keeping the performance unaffected while ensuring low complexity. Moreover, we propose an aggregated auto-encoder (AAE) pre-training paradigm for WFMs, enabling robust channel representation learning from sparsified CSI tokens via compression and recovery. Simulation results show that the proposed design reduces the computational complexity of WFM by over $83\%$ with negligible performance loss on various tasks including channel prediction, LoS/NLOS classification, beam prediction, and localization.