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arXiv · 2510.11926

Indoor Localization using Compact, Telemetry-Agnostic, Transfer-Learning Enabled Decoder-Only Transformer

Abstract

Indoor Wi-Fi positioning remains a challenging problem due to the high sensitivity of radio signals to environmental dynamics, channel propagation characteristics, and hardware heterogeneity. Conventional fingerprinting and model-based approaches typically require labor-intensive calibration and suffer rapid performance degradation when devices, channel or deployment conditions change. In this paper, we introduce Locaris, a decoder-only large language model (LLM) for indoor localization. Locaris treats each access point (AP) measurement as a token, enabling the ingestion of raw Wi-Fi telemetry without pre-processing. By fine-tuning its LLM on different Wi-Fi datasets, Locaris learns a lightweight and generalizable mapping from raw signals directly to device location. Our experimental study comparing Locaris with state-of-the-art methods consistently shows that Locaris matches or surpasses existing techniques for various types of telemetry. Our results demonstrate that compact LLMs can serve as calibration-free regression models for indoor localization, offering scalable and robust cross-environment performance in heterogeneous Wi-Fi deployments. Few-shot adaptation experiments, using only a handful of calibration points per device, further show that Locaris maintains high accuracy when applied to previously unseen devices and deployment scenarios. This yields sub-meter accuracy with just a few hundred samples, robust performance under missing APs and supports any and all available telemetry. Our findings highlight the practical viability of Locaris for indoor positioning in the real-world scenarios, particularly in large-scale deployments where extensive calibration is infeasible.

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BibTeXRIS

Nayan Sanjay Bhatia, Pranay Kocheta, Russell Elliott, Harikrishna S. Kuttivelil, Katia Obraczka. 2025-10-13. Indoor Localization using Compact, Telemetry-Agnostic, Transfer-Learning Enabled Decoder-Only Transformer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11926

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