Electromagnetic Twin: Completing the Wireless World from Sparse Channel Evidence

Abstract

Acquiring dense channel information over many locations and beams incurs considerable pilot and processing overhead. Radio maps and channel knowledge maps (CKMs) reduce this overhead by reusing site-specific channel information, but their contents must be refreshed when new measurements or environmental observations become available. This paper introduces an \emph{electromagnetic twin} as an updatable digital representation that uses sparse channel evidence to reconstruct the wireless state requested by communication queries. Rather than replacing radio maps or CKMs, the twin uses a CKM as channel memory, combines it with registered scene information, and regenerates its outputs after each evidence update. We instantiate this idea by completing a two-dimensional channel-gain field from sparse samples and an incomplete floor plan. A learned RF completion backbone recovers the main propagation structure, and a lightweight residual adapter tests whether frozen CLIP features provide useful side information. With $4\%$ measured locations and $55\%$ missing semantic objects, the RF backbone attains $4.44$ dB RMSE, compared with $8.29$ dB for CKM interpolation and $8.38$ dB for an incomplete physics prior. Residual adaptation reduces RMSE by a paired mean of $0.135$ dB (95\% confidence interval: $0.100$--$0.169$ dB), but a same-capacity random-feature control is statistically indistinguishable from the CLIP-conditioned adapter. The results therefore support the measurement--update--query loop and lightweight residual correction, while avoiding an unsupported attribution of the correction to visual semantics.