Towards Causally Interpretable Wi-Fi CSI-Based Human Activity Recognition with Discrete Latent Compression and LTL Rule Extraction
We address Human Activity Recognition (HAR) utilizing Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) under the joint requirements of causal interpretability, symbolic controllability, and direct operation on high-dimensional raw signals. Deep neural models achieve strong predictive performance on CSI-based HAR (CHAR), yet rely on continuous latent representations that are opaque and difficult to modify; purely symbolic approaches, in contrast, cannot process raw CSI streams. We propose a fully automatic and strictly decoupled pipeline in which CSI magnitude windows are compressed by a categorical variational autoencoder with Gumbel-Softmax latent variables under a capacity-controlled objective, yielding a compact discrete representation. The encoder is then frozen and used as a deterministic mapping to one-hot latent trajectories. Causal discovery is performed on these trajectories to estimate class-conditional temporal dependency graphs. Statistically supported lagged dependencies are translated into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) rules, producing a fully symbolic and deterministic classifier based solely on rule evaluation and aggregation, without any learned discriminative head. Because rules are defined over discrete latent variables, antenna-specific rule sets can in principle be combined at the symbolic level, enabling structured multi-antenna fusion without retraining the encoder. Results from CHAR Latent Temporal Rule Extraction (CHARL-TRE) indicate competitive performance while preserving explicit temporal and causal structure, showing that deterministic symbolic classification grounded in unsupervised discrete latent representations constitutes a viable alternative to end-to-end black-box models for wireless HAR.
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2604.22979 (cs) [Submitted on 24 Apr 2026] Title:Towards Causally Interpretable Wi-Fi CSI-Based Human Activity Recognition with Discrete Latent Compression and LTL Rule Extraction Authors:Luca Cotti, Luca Lavazza, Marco Cominelli, Liying Han, Gaofeng Dong, Francesco Gringoli, Mani B. Srivastava, Trevor Bihl, Erik P. Blasch, Daniel O. Brigham, Kara Combs, Lance M. Kaplan, Federico Cerutti View a PDF of the paper titled Towards Causally Interpretable Wi-Fi CSI-Based Human Activity Recognition with Discrete Latent Compression and LTL Rule Extraction, by Luca Cotti and 12 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We address Human Activity Recognition (HAR) utilizing Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) under the joint requirements of causal interpretability, symbolic controllability, and direct operation on high-dimensional raw signals. Deep neural models achieve strong predictive performance on CSI-based HAR (CHAR), yet rely on continuous latent representations that are opaque and difficult to modify; purely symbolic approaches, in contrast, cannot process raw CSI streams. We propose a fully automatic and strictly decoupled pipeline in which CSI magnitude windows are compressed by a categorical variational autoencoder with Gumbel-Softmax latent variables under a capacity-controlled objective, yielding a compact discrete representation. The encoder is then frozen and used as a deterministic mapping to one-hot latent trajectories. Causal discovery is performed on these trajectories to estimate class-conditional temporal dependency graphs. Statistically supported lagged dependencies are translated into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) rules, producing a fully symbolic and deterministic classifier based solely on rule evaluation and aggregation, without any learned discriminative head. Because rules are defined over discrete latent variables, antenna-specific rule sets can in principle be combined at the symbolic level, enabling structured multi-antenna fusion without retraining the encoder. Results from CHAR Latent Temporal Rule Extraction (CHARL-TRE) indicate competitive performance while preserving explicit temporal and causal structure, showing that deterministic symbolic classification grounded in unsupervised discrete latent representations constitutes a viable alternative to end-to-end black-box models for wireless HAR. Comments: 8 pages, 1 figure. Accepted at FUSION 2026 Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.22979 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2604.22979v1 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.22979 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Luca Cotti [view email] [v1] Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:45:49 UTC (106 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Towards Causally Interpretable Wi-Fi CSI-Based Human Activity Recognition with Discrete Latent Compression and LTL Rule Extraction, by Luca Cotti and 12 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle…
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