MapViT: A Two-Stage ViT-Based Framework for Real-Time Radio Quality Map Prediction in Dynamic Environments
Recent advancements in mobile and wireless networks are unlocking the full potential of robotic autonomy, enabling robots to take advantage of ultra-low latency, high data throughput, and ubiquitous connectivity. However, for robots to navigate and operate seamlessly, efficiently and reliably, they must have an accurate understanding of both their surrounding environment and the quality of radio signals. Achieving this in highly dynamic and ever-changing environments remains a challenging and largely unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce MapViT, a two-stage Vision Transformer (ViT)-based framework inspired by the success of pre-train and fine-tune paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs). MapViT is designed to predict both environmental changes and expected radio signal quality. We evaluate the framework using a set of representative Machine Learning (ML) models, analyzing their respective strengths and limitations across different scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed two-stage pipeline enables real-time prediction, with the ViT-based implementation achieving a strong balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. This makes MapViT a promising solution for energy- and resource-constrained platforms such as mobile robots. Moreover, the geometry foundation model derived from the self-supervised pre-training stage improves data efficiency and transferability, enabling effective downstream predictions even with limited labeled data. Overall, this work lays the foundation for next-generation digital twin ecosystems, and it paves the way for a new class of ML foundation models driving multi-modal intelligence in future 6G-enabled systems.