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
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.
arXiv:2608. 05076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Blessed Guda, Kayley Sze, Carlee Joe-Wong
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: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:2607. 09798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sixth-generation (6G) networks are moving toward AI-native operation, where learning modules are embedded across the radio access network (RAN), edge, and core.
By Sheikh Salman Hassan, Irshad A. Meer, Almoatssimbillah Saifaldawla, Yan Kyaw Tun, Mustafa Ozger, Madyan Alsenwi, Nguyen Van Huynh, Woong-Hee Lee, Cedomir Stefanovic, Mathini Sellathurai, Henk Wymeersch, Tharmalingam Ratnarajah
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
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: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
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. 08439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Heterogeneous RF sensing differs substantially in feature structure, spatial layout, and temporal scale, making existing models difficult to reuse across devices, environments, and RF modalities.
By Jing Wang, Zhu Wang, Changlong Cheng, Yifan Guo, Yin Zhang
arXiv:2507. 09627v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Next-generation wireless technologies such as 6G aim to meet demanding requirements such as ultra-high data rates, low latency, and enhanced connectivity.
By Muhammad Kamran Saeed, Ashfaq Khokhar, Shakil Ahmed