One-Step Generative CSI Prediction

Abstract

Channel state information (CSI) prediction has emerged as a promising approach for mitigating channel aging in wireless communication systems. Recently, generative models have been employed to develop CSI prediction frameworks capable of modeling the uncertainty in future channel realizations. However, the high computational complexity and inference latency of these models remain major obstacles to their practical deployment. To address these challenges, this paper focuses on a class of one-step generative models, namely MeanFlow models, in which inference requires only a single neural function evaluation (NFE), significantly reducing computational cost and latency. To alleviate the difficulty of generating CSI directly from noise, we introduce a channel-informed prior that initializes the generation process from an informative estimate of the future channel rather than pure Gaussian noise. Incorporating this channel-informed prior substantially improves both point prediction accuracy and uncertainty calibration. Furthermore, we compare the proposed MeanFlow-based CSI prediction framework with a recent diffusion-based approach. The results demonstrate that MeanFlow achieves comparable point prediction accuracy while producing better-calibrated CSI predictions with only a single NFE.