Lightweight Adaptive Feature Composition for Heterogeneous Downstream Adaptation of Wireless Foundation Models

Abstract

Mobile systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous learning-enabled wireless functions, for which separate taskspecific models incur redundant training and model-management overhead. Wireless foundation models (WFMs) enable these functions to share a pretrained backbone, but existing adaptation either updates the backbone per task or relies on an inflexible final-layer representation. We observe that intermediate WFM layers exhibit distinct depth-dependent correlation structures. Based on this observation, we propose a Routing Adapter for Feature Composition (RAFC), which summarizes selected hidden states into compact descriptors, generates task- and sampledependent routing weights, and combines the original fullresolution features without updating the pretrained backbone. Its gains arise from giving each task adaptive access to complementary representations across multiple depths rather than restricting it to the final layer. Experiments across four task categories and three WFM backbones show improvements in every evaluated backbone-task pair, with mean relative gains across the four task categories ranging from 2.9% to 35.9%, while RAFC adds only 0.003M-0.049M trainable parameters across the evaluated backbones. Experiments on a portable softwaredefined radio testbed further demonstrate improved end-to-end receiver robustness, particularly under partial-band co-channel interference. These results establish RAFC as a lightweight, model-agnostic, and interpretable adaptation interface for WFMs in mobile systems.