CoFi-CLM: A Coarse-to-Fine Channel Language Model for Finite-Bit CSI Feedback

Abstract

In frequency-division duplex massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the user equipment (UE) must convey high-dimensional downlink channel state information (CSI) under a stringent finite-bit feedback budget. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful tool for CSI compression due to its ability to capture complex channel correlations and learn compact CSI representations. However, recovering fine-scale channel structure from limited feedback remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose the Coarse-to-Fine Channel Language Model (CoFi-CLM), a large AI model deployed at the base station (BS) that explicitly learns dependencies between coarse and fine CSI representations. Specifically, the UE reports coarse-token indices from a learned codebook, while CoFi-CLM predicts distributions over unreported fine-token indices conditioned on this feedback in a single Transformer forward pass. A dual-path decoder fuses the direct coarse reconstruction with the generated fine-scale reconstruction. Concentrating fine-token prediction and fusion at the BS allows the CLM capacity to scale without increasing the computational or storage cost at the UE. Across 64 to 160 feedback bits, CoFi-CLM consistently outperforms the compared methods on both seen and unseen scenarios. At 128 bits, it improves the normalized mean square error (NMSE) over the recent large AI model baseline by approximately 1 dB on both sets. The performance gap between seen and unseen scenarios further supports its generalization under the considered channel model. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/doovvv/CoFi-CLM.