Structured-Token Attention for Fine-Grained mmWave Liquid Identification
Authors: Junseo Min, Joongheon Kim
Organizations: Department of Defense Convergence Technology, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Fine-grained liquid identification requires a classifier to distinguish similar substances from compact millimeter-wave measurements. We investigate structured-token attention, which represents a radar feature tensor through complementary antenna, feature, branch, and global views. The proposed StructAttn model embeds these views into eleven tokens and combines them with a three-layer transformer. Experiments on the public FG-LiquID data cover 30 liquids and 3,000 samples. Over five seeds on the released split, StructAttn achieves 96.70% mean best-epoch accuracy, matching the original-recipe MMNet baseline and exceeding a scalar-token attention model by 1.50 percentage points. A five-seed probability ensemble reaches 97%, corresponding to 18 errors among 600 test samples. Final-epoch and five-fold results complement the checkpoint-selected comparison, with StructAttn obtaining 95.30% out-of-fold accuracy. Token and feature analyses show that structured views are useful for prediction, while residual confusions concentrate in water, soft-drink, and edible-oil classes. These results support structured tokenization as a practical design choice for attention-based liquid recognition.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Structured views and attention processing in StructAttn-S3.
View
Count
Values
Grouping
Antenna
4
12
One receiver
Feature
4
12
One observable
Location
1
36
Distance, angles
Reflection
1
12
RSS branch
Global
1
48
Complete tensor
Total
11
–
Without [CLS]
TABLE I: Token construction for StructAttn-S3.
Model
Parameters
Best epoch
Final epoch
Macro-F1
Five-seed ensemble
Nearest centroid
0
70.17
70.17
69.31
–
MLP
50K
94.47±0.22
93.73±0.45
94.23
–
MMNet
238K
96.70±0.70
96.30±0.76
96.66
96.33 (22 errors)
MMNet-R
238K
96.93±0.09
96.23±0.19
96.85
96.67 (20 errors)
NoAttn
283K
92.37±0.14
91.43±0.25
92.10
–
AttnNet
548K
95.20±0.76
94.53±0.92
94.84
–
TABLE II: Released-split performance over five seeds. Accuracy and macro-F1 are percentages.
Category
Classes
Train
Test
Liquor
12
958
242
Edible oil
5
393
107
Soft drink
5
409
91
Water
2
161
39
Milk
2
157
43
Beer and wine
2
162
38
TABLE III: Composition of the released FG-LiquID split.
Fig. 2: Best- and final-epoch accuracy over five seeds.
Variant
Tokens
Width/layers
Params
Best
Final
S1
14
192/3
1.24M
96.33
96.00
S2
14
256/4
2.56M
96.83
96.00
S3
11
192/3
1.19M
97.00
96.50
S4
3
192/2
782K
96.33
95.00
TABLE IV: Token variants on seed 0. Accuracy is in percent.
Fig. 3: Feature masking with MMNet-R at the final epoch.
Metric or category
MMNet-R
StructAttn-S3
Fold mean ± std
95.77±0.40
95.30±0.64
Liquor
99.8
99.9
Edible oil
90.6
88.6
Soft drink
92.0
91.8
Water
84.5
82.5
Other categories
98.8
98.8
TABLE V: Final-epoch five-fold results on all 3,000 samples.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning and generative capabilities, motivating their use as universal reasoning engines for perception. While modern approaches such as vision-language models (VLMs) have attempted to incorporate reasoning capabilities into visual sensing, the integration of LLMs with the millimeter-wave (mmWave) modality-despite its unique advantages under low light and occlusion-remains largely unexplored. The principal bottlenecks stem from the scarcity of radar language pairs, severe cross-dataset heterogeneity, and the absence of a foundational mmWave encoder. We address this gap through a minimal textualization interface that serializes each mmWave point cloud into concise natural language, allowing off-the-shelf LLMs to operate in a question answering (QA) setting. Building on this, we present mmWave-QA, the first benchmark for language-conditioned mmWave human perception. mmWave-QA aggregates heterogeneous public mmWave datasets and harmonizes them via calibration-aware preprocessing and global taxonomy alignment, while providing natural language QA. Spanning six scenarios and five QA tasks, the benchmark enables standardized evaluation across diverse mmWave hardware and experimental conditions, establishing a foundation for scalable research on mmWave-LLM integration. We further evaluate and analyze LLMs on our mmWave-QA, highlighting their zero-shot reasoning potential for radar perception, as well as their robustness under visual degradation.
Large language model agents need to perceive human behavior in physical environments. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar provides a privacy-friendly and contactless sensing modality, but radar observations are difficult to align with language. Existing radar-language methods often rely on synthetic data or lack explicit supervision for human body structure and motion. We present mmMind, a radar-language model that uses synchronized 3D pose as training-only supervision. A spatio-temporal radar encoder is pretrained to capture body configuration and motion dynamics, after which the pose head is removed so that inference requires radar alone. The learned radar representations are then aligned with an LLM for behavior captioning and spatio-temporal question answering. We also introduce mmMind-Bench, a real-world mmWave-language benchmark containing 17.9 hours of recordings from 23 participants across seven indoor environments. Experiments on captioning, question answering, and unseen-action generalization show that mmMind consistently outperforms existing radar-language baselines, while ablations confirm the importance of pose-guided pretraining.
Duo Zhang, Zhehui Yin, Zhiyun Yao +8
1Peking University · 2ETH Zurich · 3Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Cameras and LiDAR degrade in rain, fog, and snow, while millimeter-wave radar remains largely unaffected. We align a radar encoder to frozen SigLIP vision embeddings and decode structured scene captions through a frozen vision-language model (VLM) with approximately 7M trainable parameters. On K-RADAR with held-out fog, light snow, and heavy snow sequences, all radar configurations outperform a camera baseline that collapses to over 90% hallucination. We identify a token-norm mismatch as the dominant failure mode when bridging radar to a frozen VLM and show that projector-output LayerNorm resolves it. Analysis of encoder complexity, caption format, and pooling strategy reveals tradeoffs that inform future radar-VLM pipeline design.
Kali Hamilton, Christoffer Heckman
Autonomous Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.