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