IIns-VAE+: A Robust Transfer Learning Framework for Environmental Identification in Wireless Sensing

Abstract

Environmental identification in wireless sensing is essential for 6G integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems to achieve reliable situational awareness. However, deep learning (DL) models for this task often fail to generalize under domain shift across diverse environments. While the Inter-Instance Variational Auto-encoder (IIns-VAE) learns features of rich representation, its neural classifier remains vulnerable to these distribution changes. In this paper, we propose IIns-VAE+, a hybrid model that combines the IIns-VAE framework with Minimax Risk Classifiers (MRC) to improve adaptability in transfer learning scenarios. We use real-world datasets to evaluate our framework across three transfer learning scenarios, including general to specific room environments, high to low label resolutions, and mixed to specific environments. The experimental results indicate that IIns-VAE+ significantly outperforms baselines, demonstrating its critical value in building adaptable and robust perceptive networks in future 6G systems.