BeamVLM for Low-altitude Economy: Generative Beam Prediction via Vision-language Models

TL;DR

BeamVLM introduces a novel vision-language model-based approach for accurate and generalizable beam prediction in low-altitude UAV communications, leveraging environmental perception and reasoning.

Contribution

This work presents the first end-to-end generative framework using vision-language models for beam prediction, integrating environmental understanding into the process.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy.

Exhibits superior generalization to different scenarios.

Effective in real-world datasets for UAV and V2I beam prediction.

Abstract

For low-altitude economy (LAE), fast and accurate beam prediction between high-mobility unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground base stations is of paramount importance, which ensures seamless coverage and reliable communications. However, existing deep learning-based beam prediction methods lack high-level semantic understanding of dynamic environments, resulting in poor generalization. On the other hand, the emerging large language model (LLM) based approaches show promise in enhancing generalization, but they typically lack rich environmental perception, thereby failing to capture fine-grained spatial semantics essential for precise beam alignment. To tackle these limitations, we propose in this correspondence a novel end-to-end generative framework for beam prediction, called BeamVLM, which treats beam prediction as a vision question answering task capitalizing on powerful existing vision-language models (VLMs). By projecting raw visual patches directly into the language domain and judiciously designing an instructional prompt, the proposed BeamVLM enables the VLM to jointly reason over UAV trajectories and environmental context. Last, experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed BeamVLM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy and also exhibits superior generalization for other scenarios such as vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) beam prediction.