Recent advances in machine learning have enabled training of wireless foundation models, which aim to support tasks such as channel estimation, beam prediction, and localization based on wireless signals. Existing wireless foundation models typically pretrain on channel tensors using masked reconstruction over subcarriers, antennas, or time but ignore the physical characteristics of wireless propagation.
The paper surveys wireless foundation models (WFMs), highlighting their role in learning reusable representations from large-scale wireless data for physical-layer tasks. It systematically reviews WFM design components—pretraining, backbone architectures, and downstream adaptation—and categorizes the literature into five task families: signal recognition and demodulation, channel representation learning, RF sensing and localization, beam management, and spectrum sensing and monitoring, including multi-task models. The analysis reveals that while WFMs show promise, evidence of transferability varies across tasks and evaluation settings, and differences in datasets, modalities, architectures, and distribution shifts hinder clear conclusions about effective design choices.
By Alonso M. Pacheco Huachaca, Juan J. Rodriguez Rodriguez, Ahmed Aboulfotouh, Nelson L. S. da Fonseca, Carlos A. Astudillo, Hatem Abou-Zeid
arXiv:2606. 06373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wireless foundation models have emerged as a promising alternative to building separate models for each wireless task.
By Ahmed Mohamed, Ahmed Aboulfotouh, Hatem Abou-Zeid
arXiv:2606.10277v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Mobile systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous learning-enabled wireless functions, for which separate taskspecific models incur redundant train...
By Yuxuan Shi, Tingting Yang, Li Sun, Liwen Jing, Kangning Ma, Yuwei Wang, Mengfan Zheng
arXiv:2606. 10277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Though wireless foundation models (WFMs) have shown strong potential in learning universal channel representations, their adaptation to various downstream tasks remains constrained by existing paradigms.
By Yuxuan Shi, Tingting Yang, Kangning Ma, Liwen Jing, Yuwei Wang, Mengfan Zheng, Li Sun
arXiv:2608. 14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and wireless communications is widely regarded as a core objective of sixth-generation (6G) systems.
By Shugong Xu, Jun Jiang, Yuan Gao
arXiv:2605.00020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The success of large foundation models is catalyzing a new paradigm for AI-native 6G network design: wireless foundation models for physical-...
By Kejia Bian, Meixia Tao, Jianhua Mo, Zhiyong Chen, Leyan Chen
arXiv:2607. 16877v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing complexity of next-generation wireless networks has driven the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into wireless communications.
By Yangjing Wang, Ouya Wang, Shenglong Zhou, Geoffrey Ye Li
arXiv:2607. 14975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Channel foundation models (CFMs) are developing rapidly, with recent studies reporting benefits from pretraining across downstream wireless tasks.
By Yuan Gao, Wenjun Yu, Jun Jiang, Yunfan Li, Xinyu Guo, Shugong Xu
arXiv:2605.00968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Wireless foundation models (WFMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for unified channel state information (CSI) acquisition across diverse...
By Chenyu Zhang, Xinchen Lyu, Chenshan Ren, Yanzhao Hou, Xuefei Zhang, Shuhan Liu, Qimei Cui
WiNeRF is a neural field framework that learns a spatially continuous, complex-valued wireless channel representation from sparse channel state information collected by commodity WiFi devices. It incorporates system constraints such as antenna geometry, limited spatial resolution, and phase uncertainty through a 3D conical wave sampling model, a multi-resolution implicit scene representation, and a differentiable optimization framework. In diverse indoor environments with non‑line‑of‑sight regions, WiNeRF achieves a median prediction SNR of 5.3 dB, outperforming prior neural baselines by 4.9 dB on average, and produces a task‑agnostic channel representation that can be reused in standard signal‑processing pipelines without hardware or protocol changes.
By Saif Ur Rahman, Rafid Umayer Murshed, Anton Dmitriev, Cagri Tanriover, Rahul C. Shah, Elah\'e Soltanaghai
arXiv:2607. 01777v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radio frequency (RF) maps provide a compact representation of multipath propagation characteristics and are fundamental to channel modeling, coverage analysis, and environment-aware wireless optimization.
By Lizhou Liu, Xiaohui Chen, Zihan Tang, Mengyao Ma, Wenyi Zhang