System-Aware Adaptive CSI Feedback via RL-Guided Autoencoder Switching in Multi-User MIMO System

Abstract

This paper proposes a system-aware adaptive channel state information (CSI) feedback framework for massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems, aiming to dynamically optimize the trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and signaling overhead. While deep learning-based autoencoders (AEs) have enabled significant CSI compression, conventional fixed-ratio schemes fail to adapt effectively to non-stationary channel conditions. To address this limitation, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL)-driven control framework that operates over a bank of pretrained multi-rate AEs, each corresponding to a distinct compression ratio (CR). At each time step, a centralized RL agent selects the most suitable CR for each user based on observed channel conditions and system performance indicators. Distinct from conventional mean squared error (MSE)-centric designs, we introduce a system-aware reward formulation that jointly accounts for spectral efficiency via signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), feedback overhead constraints, and the computational cost of model adaptation. Simulation results on high-dimensional delay-domain CSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed RL-guided framework effectively balances the overhead-accuracy tradeoff and adapts to dynamic channel environments. The proposed method improves spectral efficiency and feedback efficiency compared with fixed compression schemes and adaptive baselines, while maintaining a modest computational and memory footprint. Averaged over different numbers of users and across all considered baselines, the proposed RL framework reduces the CSI feedback cost by more than 53.4%, improves the average downlink sum rate by 53.64%, and reduces the NMSE by 22.38%. These results demonstrate its ability to achieve a more efficient rate-accuracy-feedback tradeoff under dynamic wireless conditions.