6G WavesFM: A Foundation Model for Sensing, Communication, and Localization

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Main Authors: Aboulfotouh, Ahmed, Mohammed, Elsayed, Abou-Zeid, Hatem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Aboulfotouh, Ahmed
Mohammed, Elsayed
Abou-Zeid, Hatem
author_facet Aboulfotouh, Ahmed
Mohammed, Elsayed
Abou-Zeid, Hatem
contents This paper introduces WavesFM, a novel Wireless Foundation Model (WFM) framework, capable of supporting a wide array of communication, sensing, and localization tasks. Our proposed architecture combines a shared Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone with task-specific multi-layer perceptron (MLP) heads and incorporates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. This design promotes full parameter sharing across tasks, significantly reducing the computational and memory footprint without sacrificing performance. The model processes both image-like wireless modalities, such as spectrograms and channel state information (CSI), and in-phase and quadrature (IQ) signals arranged as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) resource grids. We demonstrate the strong generalization capabilities of WavesFM through extensive experiments on four downstream tasks: Fifth Generation New Radio (5G NR) positioning; multiple-input multiple-output OFDM (MIMO-OFDM) channel estimation; human activity sensing; and radio-frequency (RF) signal classification. Compared to supervised baselines trained individually, our approach achieves superior performance while sharing 80% of its parameters across tasks. Furthermore, we show that pretraining on domain-relevant data not only boosts performance but also accelerates convergence, reducing training time by up to 5x. These results demonstrate that our unified WFM can support diverse tasks and deliver significant gains in both performance and efficiency, highlighting the transformative potential of foundation models to drive AI-native paradigms in future sixth-generation (6G) networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14100
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 6G WavesFM: A Foundation Model for Sensing, Communication, and Localization
Aboulfotouh, Ahmed
Mohammed, Elsayed
Abou-Zeid, Hatem
Signal Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
This paper introduces WavesFM, a novel Wireless Foundation Model (WFM) framework, capable of supporting a wide array of communication, sensing, and localization tasks. Our proposed architecture combines a shared Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone with task-specific multi-layer perceptron (MLP) heads and incorporates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. This design promotes full parameter sharing across tasks, significantly reducing the computational and memory footprint without sacrificing performance. The model processes both image-like wireless modalities, such as spectrograms and channel state information (CSI), and in-phase and quadrature (IQ) signals arranged as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) resource grids. We demonstrate the strong generalization capabilities of WavesFM through extensive experiments on four downstream tasks: Fifth Generation New Radio (5G NR) positioning; multiple-input multiple-output OFDM (MIMO-OFDM) channel estimation; human activity sensing; and radio-frequency (RF) signal classification. Compared to supervised baselines trained individually, our approach achieves superior performance while sharing 80% of its parameters across tasks. Furthermore, we show that pretraining on domain-relevant data not only boosts performance but also accelerates convergence, reducing training time by up to 5x. These results demonstrate that our unified WFM can support diverse tasks and deliver significant gains in both performance and efficiency, highlighting the transformative potential of foundation models to drive AI-native paradigms in future sixth-generation (6G) networks.
title 6G WavesFM: A Foundation Model for Sensing, Communication, and Localization
topic Signal Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14100