Improving Channel Estimation via Multimodal Diffusion Models with Flow Matching

Abstract: Deep generative models offer a powerful alternative to conventional channel estimation by learning complex channel distributions. By integrating the rich environmental information available in modern sensing-aided networks, this paper proposes MultiCE-Flow, a multimodal channel estimation framework based on flow matching and diffusion transformer (DiT). We design a specialized multimodal perception module that fuses LiDAR, camera, and location data into a semantic condition, while treating sparse pilots as a structural condition. These conditions guide a DiT backbone to reconstruct high-fidelity channels. Unlike standard diffusion models, we employ flow matching to learn a linear trajectory from noise to data, enabling efficient one-step sampling. By leveraging environmental semantics, our method mitigates the ill-posed nature of estimation with sparse pilots. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiCE-Flow consistently outperforms traditional baselines and existing generative models. Notably, it exhibits superior robustness to out-of-distribution scenarios and varying pilot densities, making it suitable for environment-aware communication systems.