Radiance-Field Guided Pretraining: Scaling Localization Models with Unlabeled Wireless Signals

Wireless localization is a fundamental capability of sixth-generation (6G) networks. Conventional model-based methods require accurate modeling of the propagation environment and degrade in complex multipath and non-line-of-sight scenarios, while learning-based methods couple model parameters tightly to the training scene, requiring costly retraining whenever the base station (BS) configuration or propagation environment changes. In this paper, we propose RA-LWLM, a retrieval-augmented in-context localization framework that achieves training-free cross-scene adaptation by externalizing scene-specific information into a per-scene fingerprint database rather than encoding it in model weights. The framework consists of three components: a frozen wireless foundation model (FM) encoder that maps raw channel state information into a scene-agnostic representation; a retrieval module that selects the most informative references from the per-scene database via similarity search in the representation space; and a transformer-based in-context learning (ICL) module that fuses the query with the retrieved references to predict the user equipment (UE) position. To accommodate varying retrieval quality and propagation complexity across queries, the ICL module adopts a mixture-of-experts design in which experts specialize in different context sizes and are softly combined by a learnable selector. Extensive ray-tracing-based experiments across heterogeneous scenes with diverse BS configurations show that RA-LWLM achieves nearly identical accuracy on seen and unseen scenes without any per-scene retraining, substantially outperforming end-to-end and FM-based baselines. These results validate the proposed retrieval-augmented in-context paradigm as a scalable solution for cross-scene localization in 6G networks.

Learning-based wireless localizers often fail to utilize geometric information about the propagation environment, limiting their ability to exploit non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation and generalize across scenes. To bridge this gap, we propose GLocFM, a Geometry-aware Localization Foundation Model, which jointly exploits WiFi measurements and scene geometry represented as a 3D point cloud. We formulate localization as a maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation problem, where the goal is to find a transmitter position that maximizes the likelihood of the wireless observations conditioned on the scene geometry. The likelihood of a candidate transmitter position is calculated by a learned scoring function that matches the observed delay--angle-of-arrival (AoA) spectrum against the spectrum predicted for that candidate. A hierarchical scene encoder extracts propagation-relevant features to produce geometric priors for LoS and one-bounce reflection paths. For scenarios with imperfect synchronization, we further introduce a time-of-flight (ToF)-robust GLocFM model to handle unknown ToF offsets. GLocFM is trained on a multi-modal synthetic indoor localization dataset comprising 221 diverse scenes whose associated wireless signals are generated using Sionna RT. On both synthetic and the NeRF$^{2}$ dataset based on real measurements, GLocFM reduces mean 3D localization error relative to one of the state-of-the-art localization baselines by 49.5% and 48.8%, respectively. Ablations across different number of receiver, bandwidths, and array sizes further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.

Building a site-specific propagation model typically requires either ray-tracing over detailed 3D maps or dense measurement campaigns. Both approaches are expensive and often infeasible for rapid deployments where geographic data is unavailable or outdated. We present PropSplat, a map-free propagation modeling method that reconstructs radio frequency (RF) fields using 3D anisotropic Gaussian primitives. Each Gaussian encodes a scalar path loss offset relative to an explicit baseline path loss model with a learnable path loss exponent. Gaussians are initialized along observed transmitter--receiver paths and optimized end-to-end to learn the propagation environment without external information like floor plans, terrain databases, or clutter data. We evaluate PropSplat against wireless radiance field methods NeRF$^2$, GSRF, and WRF-GS+ on two real-world datasets. On large-scale outdoor drive-tests spanning multiple topographical regions at six sub-6 GHz frequencies, PropSplat achieves 5.38 dB RMSE when training measurements are spaced 300m apart and outperforms WRF-GS+ (5.87 dB), GSRF (7.46 dB), and NeRF$^2$ (14.76 dB). On indoor Bluetooth Low Energy measurements, PropSplat achieves 0.19m mean localization error, an order of magnitude better than NeRF$^2$ (1.84m), while achieving near-identical received signal strength prediction accuracy. These results show that accurate site-specific propagation reconstruction is achievable from sparse RF-native measurements. The need for geographic data as a prerequisite for scalable RF environment modeling is reduced.