# Physics-Guided Attention in a Lightweight TCN for Efficient WiFi CSI-Based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01834 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01834/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Temporal Convolutional Networks for Action Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05267/) (2016)
- [SenseFi: A Library and Benchmark on Deep-Learning-Empowered WiFi Human Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07859/) (2022)
- [Human Activity Recognition from Wi-Fi CSI Data Using Principal Component-Based Wavelet CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13161/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human Action Recognition (HAR) using WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has gained increasing attention due to its non-contact, low-cost, and privacy-preserving nature. However, existing learning-based approaches largely rely on deep, computationally intensive architectures to implicitly capture motion dynamics from CSI measurements, thereby increasing model complexity and reducing efficiency. Instead, we argue that incorporating appropriate inductive biases tailored to the physical characteristics of CSI signals enables more efficient and effective learning. In this work, we propose a compact temporal convolutional network (TCN)-based framework that explicitly incorporates motion-aware inductive biases into feature learning. Specifically, we introduce a Doppler-energy-guided temporal attention mechanism in feature space to emphasize motion-salient time segments, and a variance-driven channel attention module to weight informative subcarriers based on temporal motion statistics adaptively. By integrating these domain-specific priors, the proposed model effectively captures motion dynamics without increasing architectural depth. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to deeper baselines, while significantly reducing parameter count and computational cost.