CAT-MoEformer: Context-Aware Temporal MoE Transformer for Beam Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces CAT-MoEformer, a scene-conditioned transformer model that improves mmWave beam prediction accuracy and efficiency by integrating a mixture-of-experts approach conditioned on physical scene descriptors.

Contribution

The novel scene-conditioned MoE transformer architecture enhances beam prediction accuracy and interpretability while reducing load imbalance and latency.

Findings

Achieves 94.88% Top-1 beam prediction accuracy.

Improves beam switching instant accuracy by 9.55%.

Operates with an inference latency of 0.52 ms.

Abstract

This paper proposes CAT-MoEformer, a context-aware transformer with scene-conditioned mixture-of-experts (MoE) feed-forward networks, for proactive mmWave beam prediction from compressed uplink pilot observations. The spatial encoder comprises a three-layer asymmetric convolutional network followed by a squeeze-and-excitation recalibration block, which extracts frequency-beam correlation features from pilot tensors without explicit channel reconstruction. A truncated pretrained GPT-2 backbone models the temporal evolution of beam sequences, with the feed-forward networks in the upper three transformer layers replaced by scene-conditioned MoE-FFN modules. A lightweight gating network maps the scenario label and normalized user equipment speed to expert mixing weights, conditioning the routing decision on physical propagation descriptors rather than on latent hidden states. This design yields interpretable expert assignments and eliminates the load imbalance associated with token-level routing. To prevent expert collapse under soft routing, a three-stage training strategy is introduced: hard expert assignment in the first stage establishes scene-specific specialization, isolated gating network training in the second stage aligns the soft routing distribution with the hard partition, and top-1 hard inference in the third stage fine-tunes the model under deterministic single-expert activation to maximize scene-specific precision. Simulation results on 3GPP TR 38.901 Urban Macro channel simulations with $64{,}000$ user samples demonstrate that CAT-MoEformer achieves a Top-1 beam prediction accuracy of $94.88\%$ and a beam switching instant accuracy of $80.62\%$, representing gains of $2.33\%$ and $9.55\%$ respectively over a CNN+GPT-2 baseline, with an inference latency of $0.52$~ms.