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: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:2606.10277v2 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:2607. 02567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) provides a physical-layer credential for Internet of Things devices, but open-set decisions become fragile when a threshold calibrated on a source receiver is applied to a target receiver.
By Fengchong Yao, Jianbing Li, Qing Liu, Kefeng Song, Haitao Li, Song Wang, Feixiang Wang
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
The paper introduces a self‑localizing MIMO beam‑mapping framework that builds a hierarchical wireless memory using sparse channel state information (CSI) without explicit location labels. It employs beam‑domain RSS as compact inputs, a dual‑scale extractor for angular and temporal dependencies, and a hybrid temporal encoder to infer physical anchors that index a structured radio map. The radio‑map embedding enables continuous updates and full‑CSI reconstruction, yielding over 30% better anchor recovery and more than 20% channel‑capacity gains in NLOS beam tracking compared to Kalman‑filter methods.
By Wangqian Chen, Junting Chen, Shuguang Cui