Analogical Learning for Cross-Scenario Generalization: Framework and Application to Intelligent Localization

Abstract

Modern learning systems often struggle with joint learning across diverse scenarios and immediate adaptation to new ones, because they rely heavily on the scenario-dependent absolute data-label representations. Here, we propose analogical learning (AL), a learning framework that explores the inherent invariance of the underlying physical processes across scenarios, to improve the cross-scenario generalization. Specifically, we introduce the physical concepts of reference frames and relativity into the neural modeling. The resultant framework explicitly employs intra-scenario data-label pairs as reference anchors and enforces the network to mediate its data-to-label transformation through data-domain relative metrics that factor out the scenario-dependent variations. We instantiate AL with Mateformer, a bipartite Transformer-based neural architecture. Each layer of the auxiliary Transformer extracts certain feature space of the current data, while the corresponding layer of the primary Transformer computes attention among the data feature space and then use it as a relativity metric to weight the current label feature to synthesize the next label feature and, ultimately, the final prediction. We apply AL to intelligent wireless localization, a representative multi-scenario learning task. Across synthetic, real-world, and city-scale datasets, AL enables robust cross-scenario transfer and multi-scenario joint learning, achieving wavelength-scale localization accuracy that matches or surpasses state-of-the-art methods. This physics-inspired learning framework provides a promising alternative for other cross-scenario learning tasks and applications.