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