eess.SPAug 17, 2026

RadioVIL: Anomaly-Aware Diffusion Models for Radio Map Inpainting and Zero-Shot Vehicle Localization

Authors: Ruixin Zhao, Xiucheng Wang, Qiming Zhang, Nan Cheng, Ruijin Sun, Conghao Zhou

Organizations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China · State Key Laboratory of ISN and School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

Abstract

High-precision radio map construction is essential for emerging 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) applications, including digital twins and intelligent transportation. However, existing deep learning methods predominantly treat this as a pure image completion task, resulting in over-smoothed reconstructions that fundamentally erase high-frequency scattering signatures of dynamic physical entities such as hidden vehicles. To overcome this, we propose RadioVIL, an efficient two-stage framework that reformulates joint radio map inpainting and zero-shot vehicle localization as a prior-guided physical inverse problem. Specifically, we first train a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) to capture the structural generative prior of the environment. During inference from highly sparse measurements, we employ a Diffusion-based Mediating Intermediate Layer Optimization (DMILO) algorithm. By optimizing an L1-regularized sparse deviation term, DMILO mathematically isolates vehicle scattering anomalies layer-by-layer without unfolding the entire denoising chain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while conventional reconstruction baselines fail to detect hidden vehicles, and the zero-shot diffusion baseline achieves only limited detection ability due to forced semantic harmonization, RadioVIL preserves authentic physical textures, yielding the best LPIPS of 0.0587 in our evaluation. Uniquely, it unlocks accurate zero-shot vehicle localization directly from sparse radio maps, securing a 75.20% Recall and a 3.31-meter average error, paving a robust way for ISAC at the 6G edge.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Mar 19, 2026

RadioDiff-FS: Physics-Informed Manifold Alignment in Few-Shot Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Radio Map Construction

Radio maps (RMs) provide spatially continuous propagation characterizations essential for 6G network planning, but high-fidelity RM construction remains challenging. Rigorous electromagnetic solvers incur prohibitive computational latency, while data-driven models demand massive labeled datasets and generalize poorly from simplified simulations to complex multipath environments. This paper proposes RadioDiff-FS, a few-shot diffusion framework that adapts a pretrained main-path generator to multipath-rich target domains with only a small number of high-fidelity samples. The adaptation is grounded in a theoretical decomposition of the multipath RM into a dominant main-path component and a directionally sparse residual. This decomposition shows that the cross-domain shift corresponds to a bounded and geometrically structured feature translation rather than an arbitrary distribution change. A direction-consistency loss (DCL) is then introduced to constrain diffusion score updates along physically plausible propagation directions, thereby suppressing phase-inconsistent artifacts that arise in the low-data regime. Experiments show that RadioDiff-FS reduces NMSE by 59.5% on static RMs and by 74.0% on dynamic RMs relative to the vanilla diffusion baseline, achieving an SSIM of 0.9752 and a PSNR of 36.37 dB under severely limited supervision. Even in a one-shot setting with a single target-domain sample per scene, RadioDiff-FS outperforms all fully supervised baselines, confirming that the directional constraint provides an effective inductive bias under extreme data scarcity. Code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/RadioDiff-FS.
Jul 9, 2026

RadioDiff-v2: Generative Angular Radio Maps for Multi-Beam Selection and Localization

Angular radio maps describe the received-power distribution over the angle of arrival and underpin beam selection and receiver localization in sixth-generation (6G) networks. Predicting the angular power spectrum (APS) from geometry is difficult, because the mapping is ill-posed in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions and must generalize to unseen environments. Distortion-minimizing regressors return the conditional mean, which over-smooths the spectrum and erases the multipath structure that downstream tasks need. We cast the task as a perception-distortion problem and propose RadioDiff-v2, a dual-branch one-dimensional diffusion transformer trained with flow matching. It couples periodic angular encoding, adaptive layer-normalization conditioning, a Fourier angular mixer, and joint velocity and clean-signal heads. A per-metric estimator portfolio reads every deployment quantity from this single model, so that samples carry the distribution, the clean-signal head supplies a regression-grade point estimate, Bayes-optimal rules select beams, and the conditional likelihood localizes the receiver. We prove that a concentrated conditional yields a straight probability-flow trajectory that one step integrates exactly, identifying deterministic transport as the correct inductive bias. On a zero-shot test of 99 environments and one million links, RadioDiff-v2 leads every baseline on every metric, with a 0.39 dB Wasserstein-1 distance, per-bin error below the regression baseline, a 2.43 dB eight-beam NLOS sweep loss, and a 20.6-pixel localization error with four base stations. Code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/RadioDiff-v2.
Jul 23, 2026

RadioTrace: Transmitter-Aware Diffusion for Radio Map Estimation without Deployment-Time Fine-Tuning

Radio map (RM) estimation aims to reconstruct the spatial distribution of wireless signal characteristics, such as received signal strength (RSS), from sparse measurements, a task that is critical for spectrum management, interference mitigation, and localization in modern wireless networks. Traditional approaches, including interpolation and deep learning, either struggle to capture complex propagation effects or require large-scale retraining for each new sampling pattern, which limits their generalization. More recently, prior-based methods have combined pre-trained generative models with measurements to reduce the need for deployment-time model fine-tuning, but they typically treat the prior as a simple regularizer and lack explicit transmitter-aware integration. In this paper, we propose RadioTrace, a novel RM estimation framework without deployment-time fine-tuning that tightly integrates sparse RSS measurements with a frozen pre-trained diffusion prior. RadioTrace incorporates transmitter (Tx) location estimation directly into the denoising loop, iteratively refining Tx coordinates based on reconstruction quality to guide the generative process. To further enhance robustness, we introduce a propagation-guided K-means initialization that mitigates poor local minima in the Tx update and provides a geometry-consistent starting point. Moreover, we provide a stochastic stability analysis for the Tx-coordinate refinement component, showing that the Tx update remains stable under perturbations induced by diffusion sampling and Tx-map relaxation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RadioTrace achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art learning-based methods under random sampling, and maintains strong reconstruction quality under restricted-area sampling, highlighting its adaptability, robustness, and practical relevance.