Physics Equivariance for Robust Generalization in Wireless Foundation Model

Abstract: Wireless foundation models (WFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for learning multiple channel state information (CSI) acquisition tasks. However, unlike natural language tokens governed by statistical co-occurrence, wireless channels are generated by electromagnetic propagation laws, and current WFM training is constrained by limited data scale, narrow distribution coverage dominated by simulations, and a pronounced sim-to-real gap. As a result, simply scaling model parameters and CSI samples does not necessarily yield robust and generalizable models. In this paper, we advocate enabling physics equivariance as a principled and explainable inductive bias for WFMs. Specifically, we focus on a universal propagation property for electromagnetic waves, termed wave equivariance: when the input CSI is modulated along time-frequency-space dimensions, the output channel response should exhibit the corresponding transformation. Empirical studies show that the vanilla-WFM fails to reliably acquire such equivariance even with a large number of model parameters and training samples. To address this, we design the physics-intrinsic WFM (phys-WFM) with wave equivariance, which explicitly aligns model behaviors with an interpretable wave propagation structure. Results demonstrate that the proposed design effectively captures wave equivariance and substantially improves robustness and generalization to unseen environments under distribution shift, offering a physics-grounded and testable route toward explainable wireless foundation models.