Full-Domain Coupler: A Wireless Native Neural Backbone for Channel Representation and Deduction

Abstract

Data representation is a fundamental issue in deep learning. However, as wireless data scales and deeply couples across many physical domains such as time, space, and frequency, existing wireless artificial intelligence (AI) technologies lack dedicated representation solutions. Instead, they mainly rely on stitching general-purpose networks, a tool-driven paradigm that inevitably results in structural redundancy and bottlenecks in information flow. To fill this gap, this paper proposes Coupler, a wireless native-AI neural backbone designed for representation learning of channel state information (CSI)--the pivotal data in wireless systems. Leveraging the revealed physical insights of channel tensors, Coupler decomposes representation learning into individual domains on a layer-by-layer basis, and then couples the learned domain-specific features through a dimension-staggered cascade. This full-domain interleaved learning architecture enables superior parameter efficiency and fine-grained multi-domain feature fusion. Based on this backbone, we use the complex-domain multilayer perceptrons (CMLPs) as spatial and frequency domain learners, while employing three optional mechanisms--convolution, attention, or gating--to capture temporal dependencies. This results in a series of efficient channel learning schemes with diverse functionalities and extreme lightweights, showcasing the compactness, versatility and flexibility of Coupler. We evaluate these schemes on channel deduction, a general representation task encompassing channel estimation, interpolation, prediction, and feedback. Extensive experimental evaluations validate their significant performance gains and robust applicability even for real-world measured data, demonstrating the potential of Coupler as a promising basic architecture in the design of wireless foundation models.