In-context learning for MIMO turbo receivers

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) turbo receivers iteratively exchange information between a soft-input soft-output detector and a decoder. Traditional implementations rely on pilot-based channel estimates, which can be poor in the case of short pilot sequences or mismatched channel models, resulting in significant performance degradation. To address this limitation, we introduce the EXTrinsic In-Context Learning Network (EXT-ICLNet), a Transformer-based detector that takes the pilots as in-context examples and is trained to approximate the symbol extrinsic posterior distribution given the pilots, without explicit channel estimation. EXT-ICLNet is thus compatible with existing turbo receivers, as it implements a log-domain prior skip connection, ensuring that the network learns only the extrinsic information. Numerical results for a 4×4 MIMO system with 16-QAM and a quantized front end show that EXT-ICLNet outperforms baselines based on explicit channel state information (CSI) estimation at low-to-medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), as well as expectation-propagation (EP) baselines with perfect CSI at high SNRs. The results are further validated by comparing the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts of EXT-ICLNet, a neural EP baseline, and EXT-ICLNet without skip connection, demonstrating how EXT-ICLNet provides a more favorable transfer of a priori and extrinsic information.