CSI-Bench: A Large-Scale In-the-Wild Dataset for Multi-task WiFi Sensing
This dataset addresses the need for scalable, privacy-preserving WiFi sensing in health and human-centric applications by providing a benchmark to improve generalization, though it is incremental as it focuses on data collection rather than a new method.
The authors tackled the problem of WiFi sensing systems struggling to generalize in real-world settings by introducing CSI-Bench, a large-scale, in-the-wild dataset collected across 26 diverse indoor environments with 35 users over 461 hours, which includes task-specific and co-labeled multitask data for activities like fall detection and breathing monitoring.
WiFi sensing has emerged as a compelling contactless modality for human activity monitoring by capturing fine-grained variations in Channel State Information (CSI). Its ability to operate continuously and non-intrusively while preserving user privacy makes it particularly suitable for health monitoring. However, existing WiFi sensing systems struggle to generalize in real-world settings, largely due to datasets collected in controlled environments with homogeneous hardware and fragmented, session-based recordings that fail to reflect continuous daily activity. We present CSI-Bench, a large-scale, in-the-wild benchmark dataset collected using commercial WiFi edge devices across 26 diverse indoor environments with 35 real users. Spanning over 461 hours of effective data, CSI-Bench captures realistic signal variability under natural conditions. It includes task-specific datasets for fall detection, breathing monitoring, localization, and motion source recognition, as well as a co-labeled multitask dataset with joint annotations for user identity, activity, and proximity. To support the development of robust and generalizable models, CSI-Bench provides standardized evaluation splits and baseline results for both single-task and multi-task learning. CSI-Bench offers a foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving WiFi sensing systems in health and broader human-centric applications.