C2L-Net: A Data-Driven Model for State-of-Charge Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries During Discharge

Accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation is critical for the safe and efficient operation of lithium-ion batteries in battery management systems (BMS). Although data-driven approaches can effectively capture nonlinear battery dynamics, many existing methods rely on long historical input sequences, resulting in high computational cost and introducing padding-induced positional bias at the beginning of drive cycles. To address these limitations, we propose C2L-Net, a novel context-to-latest data-driven framework for realistic online SOC estimation using only a short historical window (20 s). Unlike existing short-receptive-field or long-history models, the proposed framework explicitly separates contextual encoding from latest-measurement updating, enabling both efficient temporal modeling and rapid adaptation to dynamic battery states. The proposed model incorporates a chunk-based feature extraction mechanism that combines Theta Attention Pooling with a Fourier-based Seasonality Basis to capture local temporal patterns while reducing sequence length. A causal context encoder, integrating a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with Causal Cosine Attention, models temporal dependencies without information leakage. Furthermore, a latest-measurement decoder, inspired by recursive filtering, updates the contextual state using the most recent measurement, enhancing responsiveness to dynamic operating conditions. Extensive experiments on a public lithium-ion battery drive-cycle dataset under multiple fixed-temperature conditions demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency. In particular, C2L-Net achieves up to 60 times faster inference and requires fewer parameters than recent data-driven baselines, while maintaining robust performance across unseen driving profiles.