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Main Authors: Mohammed, Elsayed, Mashaal, Omar, Digby, Alec, Leone, Pasquale, Swersky, Lorne, Eshaghbeigi, Ashkan, Abou-Zeid, Hatem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14476
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author Mohammed, Elsayed
Mashaal, Omar
Digby, Alec
Leone, Pasquale
Swersky, Lorne
Eshaghbeigi, Ashkan
Abou-Zeid, Hatem
author_facet Mohammed, Elsayed
Mashaal, Omar
Digby, Alec
Leone, Pasquale
Swersky, Lorne
Eshaghbeigi, Ashkan
Abou-Zeid, Hatem
contents Angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation is a crucial function in wireless communications used for localization, beam-forming, interference management, and other applications. Deep learning (DL) solutions have been proposed for AoA to mitigate limitations of traditional AoA estimation techniques such as sensitivity to noise and the inability to generalize across different array characteristics. A challenge, however, of DL-based approaches is their reliance on large data collection campaigns and model training. This paper proposes the application of Prototypical Networks (PN) to address this challenge and utilizes a real-world dataset collected on a software defined radio (SDR) testbed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Prototypical Networks excel in extracting representative embeddings from unstructured input data, establishing class prototypes during training that can be few-shot trained on unseen classes. We demonstrate the efficacy of PNs for AoA classification using complex IQ samples, focusing on its ability to correctly classify new, unseen angles that the model was not trained on previously. Our results show that training our proposed ProtoAoA on only 23% of the AoA dataset classes can attain a mean absolute error (MAE) of 3 degrees with only 4-shots of training on the unseen angles - and an MAE of 2 degrees with 32-shots of training data. These results demonstrate that the developed prototypical network architecture requires remarkably few data samples to achieve reliable AoA estimation - and highlights its potential for other wireless applications where data availability is limited.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ProtoAoA: Few-Shot Angle-of-Arrival Estimation using Prototypical Networks
Mohammed, Elsayed
Mashaal, Omar
Digby, Alec
Leone, Pasquale
Swersky, Lorne
Eshaghbeigi, Ashkan
Abou-Zeid, Hatem
Signal Processing
Angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation is a crucial function in wireless communications used for localization, beam-forming, interference management, and other applications. Deep learning (DL) solutions have been proposed for AoA to mitigate limitations of traditional AoA estimation techniques such as sensitivity to noise and the inability to generalize across different array characteristics. A challenge, however, of DL-based approaches is their reliance on large data collection campaigns and model training. This paper proposes the application of Prototypical Networks (PN) to address this challenge and utilizes a real-world dataset collected on a software defined radio (SDR) testbed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Prototypical Networks excel in extracting representative embeddings from unstructured input data, establishing class prototypes during training that can be few-shot trained on unseen classes. We demonstrate the efficacy of PNs for AoA classification using complex IQ samples, focusing on its ability to correctly classify new, unseen angles that the model was not trained on previously. Our results show that training our proposed ProtoAoA on only 23% of the AoA dataset classes can attain a mean absolute error (MAE) of 3 degrees with only 4-shots of training on the unseen angles - and an MAE of 2 degrees with 32-shots of training data. These results demonstrate that the developed prototypical network architecture requires remarkably few data samples to achieve reliable AoA estimation - and highlights its potential for other wireless applications where data availability is limited.
title ProtoAoA: Few-Shot Angle-of-Arrival Estimation using Prototypical Networks
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14476