Vision-Wireless Fusion for Multi-User Localization: A Cross-Modal Transformer Approach

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.

Accurate 3D localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains challenging for existing multimodal approaches due to sparse LiDAR geometry, modality-imbalanced fusion, and redundant feature transmission over constrained edge-to-server links. To address these limitations, we propose PRI-Net, an efficient and lightweight multimodal fusion framework for UAV localization that integrates point cloud splatting, residual attention fusion, and an information bottleneck. Specifically, a 3D point cloud splatting (3DPCS) strategy is introduced to transform sparse LiDAR observations into geometrically consistent dense depth maps. A residual attention fusion (RAF) module is then designed to alleviate modal bias by using an image branch for coarse estimation and a gated fusion branch for refinement. In addition, a multimodal information bottleneck (MIB) module compacts features by filtering task-irrelevant redundancy. Experiments show that PRI-Net achieves high localization accuracy with lightweight architectures, while reducing feature dimensionality and improving edge-to-server UAV sensing efficiency and robustness.

Accurate and robust wireless localization is a critical enabler for emerging 5G/6G applications, including autonomous driving, extended reality, and smart manufacturing. Despite its importance, achieving precise localization across diverse environments remains challenging due to the complex nature of wireless signals and their sensitivity to environmental changes. Existing data-driven approaches often suffer from limited generalization capability, requiring extensive labeled data and struggling to adapt to new scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SigMap, a multimodal foundation model that introduces two key innovations: (1) A cycle-adaptive masking strategy that dynamically adjusts masking patterns based on channel periodicity characteristics to learn robust wireless representations; (2) A novel "map-as-prompt" framework that integrates 3D geographic information through lightweight soft prompts for effective cross-scenario adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple localization tasks while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization in unseen environments, significantly outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines by considerable margins.