Learning or Modeling? Virtual XL-RIS Observation Reconstruction for Near-Field Sensing

Abstract

A passive extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) offers a position-sensitive aperture for near-field sensing, but its element-wise signals are not directly observed. Recovering this virtual RIS observation (VOR) from fewer base-station measurements requires prior information. This paper investigates when calibrated propagation geometry or paired training data provides the more effective reconstruction prior. For a common sensing operator and target signal, we develop off-grid near-field sparse parametric reconstruction (OG-NF-SPR) and compare it with compact and DenseNet-based deep reconstructors. OG-NF-SPR uses reflected-path projection for position initialization, followed by Bayesian estimation of all path gains and continuous position refinement. A causal extension incorporates temporal correlation without trajectory labels. Controlled simulations use near-field UAV tracking as an illustration and separately examine noise, position-distribution shift, calibration error, and propagation mismatch. Under matched propagation at 20 dB, OG-NF-SPR achieves approximately 67% lower reconstruction NMSE than the two nominal deep networks. At low SNR, statistical averaging is more effective than selecting a single geometric explanation. Under sufficiently strong repeatable mismatch, a same-size network trained on the mismatch family outperforms the nominal physical estimator, whereas nominal training does not provide this benefit. Temporal regularization also reduces position RMSE from 0.653 m to 0.225 m on a shared trajectory. The results relate reconstruction performance to measurement quality, calibration accuracy, and training coverage, providing guidance on when geometry can replace supervised labels and when additional data are useful.