Methods, systems, and devices are described for wireless communication at a UE. A base station may select a hybrid pilot configuration including a relatively sparse periodic pilot and a dense pilot embedded in one or more symbols of a low latency burst. A user equipment (UE) may generate a long term statistical average channel estimate based on the periodic pilot and an instantaneous channel estimate (e.g., for demodulation) based on the dense pilot embedded in the low latency burst. The UE may refine the instantaneous channel estimate by converting a control channel embedded with the burst. In some instances, the base station may embed the dense pilots in the first symbol of a burst and transmit subsequent low latency symbols with a reduced density pilot (or without pilot tones).