ARC-Fi: Exploiting Antenna Spatial Diversity for Label-Efficient Domain Generalization in Wi-Fi Sensing

TL;DR

ARC-Fi introduces a physics-informed semi-supervised domain generalization framework for Wi-Fi sensing, leveraging antenna spatial diversity to improve robustness and reduce reliance on labeled data in unseen environments.

Contribution

The paper proposes ARC-Fi, the first SSDG framework for Wi-Fi sensing that uses antenna response consistency and contrastive learning to enhance domain generalization with limited labels.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on Widar and CSIDA datasets.

Effectively prevents environmental shortcut learning in CSI data.

Significantly outperforms existing UDA, DG, and SSDG methods.

Abstract

Wi-Fi sensing systems are severely hindered by domain shifts when deployed in unseen real-world environments. While existing methods attempt to tackle this through Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) or Domain Generalization (DG), they critically rely on either inaccessible target data or prohibitively expensive, massive labeled source datasets. In practice, collecting abundant unlabeled Channel State Information (CSI) is feasible, whereas manual labeling is severely constrained. This realistic dilemma necessitates Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization (SSDG). To this end, we propose ARC-Fi, the first dedicated SSDG framework for Wi-Fi sensing. Directly applying conventional contrastive learning to CSI data inevitably triggers paradigm-specific "shortcut learning," causing models to memorize environmental backgrounds rather than gesture dynamics. To overcome this, ARC-Fi introduces a physics-informed data augmentation strategy: the Antenna Response Consistency (ARC) module. ARC exploits the intrinsic spatial diversity of multi-antenna systems, treating signals from co-located antennas as naturally semantics-preserving augmented views to explicitly block environmental shortcuts. Furthermore, we introduce a unified Semi-Supervised Contrastive Objective that leverages scarce labels and reliable pseudo-labels to align cross-domain features, effectively preventing the blind repulsion of same-class instances. Extensive experiments on the Widar and CSIDA datasets demonstrate that ARC-Fi establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing UDA, DG, and SSDG methods. Ultimately, this work provides a physics-grounded, label-efficient solution, advancing the scalable deployment of robust real-world Wi-Fi sensing systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/KaoruMiyazono/UniCrossFi.