Radio-FM: A Foundation Model for Radio Signal Representation Learning and Its Applications

Abstract

Applying foundation models to the radio frequency (RF) domain presents unique challenges due to the intrinsic physical complexity of raw I/Q signals and the extreme heterogeneity of spectral data. In this paper, we present Radio-FM, a scalable family of foundation models designed for universal radio signal representation learning. Unlike standard architectures, Radio-FM employs dual-channel processing specifically optimized for I/Q independence while capturing cross-channel interactions through a lightweight attention mechanism. To scale pretraining across heterogeneous multi-source corpora with highly variable sequence lengths, we propose a token-budgeted dynamic batching strategy coupled with channel-independent masked reconstruction. We pretrain Radio-FM on a diverse collection of 15 datasets spanning modulation, radar, and communication domains, and rigorously evaluate it on 15 downstream benchmarks. Experimental results show Radio-FM achieves state-of-the-art performance on 13 of 15 benchmarks, consistently improving across modulation, radar, emitter identification, wireless technology recognition, and wireless interference identification. Notably, it exhibits superior few-shot transferability, significantly outperforming existing baselines in data-scarce regimes, validating its potential as a general-purpose backbone for radio signal understanding.