AmbientFM: A Foundation Model for Ambient Sensing

Ambient intelligence seeks to continuously understand human presence, activity, and physiology in physical spaces, enabling smart environments, health monitoring, and human-computer interaction. WiFi infrastructure offers a ubiquitous, always-on, and privacy-preserving sensing substrate across billions of IoT devices. Yet ambient sensing with WiFi remains largely fragmented, with most systems relying on task-specific models, labeled data collection, and customized training pipelines. We present AmbientFM, the first foundation model for ambient sensing through ubiquitous WiFi signals. AmbientFM is pre-trained on 9.2 million unlabeled Channel State Information (CSI) samples collected over 439 days from 20 commercial device types deployed in real-world environments. It learns transferable wireless representations through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and physics-informed objectives tailored to wireless signals. With lightweight adaptation, a single backbone transfers to 9 downstream tasks, achieving above 0.90 AUROC on all classification benchmarks and supporting dense spatial reconstruction. AmbientFM reduces the need for labeled data and task-specific design, enabling scalable ambient intelligence on existing wireless infrastructure.