# Large Language Model (LLM) for Telecommunications: A Comprehensive Survey on Principles, Key Techniques, and Opportunities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10825/

## Key facts

- Cited by 83 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 135 of its 204 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 135)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Mobile Edge Intelligence for Large Language Models: A Contemporary Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18921/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-Agent Cooperative Decision-Making: Scenarios, Approaches, Challenges and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13415/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Communication, Network, and Service Management: Application Insights, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19823/) (2024)
- [ORAN-Bench-13K: An Open Source Benchmark for Assessing LLMs in Open Radio Access Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06245/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of RAG Metrics for Question Answering in the Telecom Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12873/) (2024)
- [An overview of domain-specific foundation model: key technologies, applications and challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04267/) (2024)
- [APEX: An Extensible and Dynamism-Aware Simulator for Automated Parallel Execution in LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17651/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for the Optimization of Next-Generation Wireless Networks: Basics, State-of-the-Art, and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17454/) (2024)
- [Generative Diffusion Models for Wireless Networks: Fundamental, Architecture, and State-of-the-Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16733/) (2025)
- [6G WavesFM: A Foundation Model for Sensing, Communication, and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14100/) (2025)
- [WDMoE: Wireless Distributed Mixture of Experts for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06681/) (2024)
- [From Prompts to Protection: Large Language Model-Enabled In-Context Learning for Smart Public Safety UAV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02649/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Security Operations Centers: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10858/) (2025)
- [LLM-OptiRA: LLM-Driven Optimization of Resource Allocation for Non-Convex Problems in Wireless Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02091/) (2025)
- [ComAgent: Multi-LLM based Agentic AI Empowered Intelligent Wireless Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19607/) (2026)
- [End-to-End Edge AI Service Provisioning Framework in 6G ORAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11933/) (2025)
- [The Larger the Merrier? Efficient Large AI Model Inference in Wireless Edge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09214/) (2025)
- [Agentic AI Empowered Intent-Based Networking for 6G](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06640/) (2026)
- [MoE2: Optimizing Collaborative Inference for Edge Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09410/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models in Operations Research: Methods, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18180/) (2025)
- [RF-GPT: Teaching AI to See the Wireless World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14833/) (2026)
- [Neuralink: Fast LLM Inference on Smartphones with Neuron Co-Activation Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19274/) (2024)
- [LAMeTA: Intent-Aware Agentic Network Optimization via a Large AI Model-Empowered Two-Stage Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12247/) (2025)
- [Mapping the Landscape of Generative AI in Network Monitoring and Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08576/) (2025)
- [Bridging Physical and Digital Worlds: Embodied Large AI for Future Wireless Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24009/) (2025)
- [FRSICL: LLM-Enabled In-Context Learning Flight Resource Allocation for Fresh Data Collection in UAV-Assisted Wildfire Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10134/) (2025)
- [Symbiotic Agents: A Novel Paradigm for Trustworthy AGI-driven Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17695/) (2025)
- [Semantic Reformulation Entropy for Robust Hallucination Detection in QA Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17445/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model as a Catalyst: A Paradigm Shift in Base Station Siting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03631/) (2024)
- [LLM-TS Integrator: Integrating LLM for Enhanced Time Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16489/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have received considerable attention recently due to their outstanding comprehension and reasoning capabilities, leading to great progress in many fields. The advancement of LLM techniques also offers promising opportunities to automate many tasks in the telecommunication (telecom) field. After pre-training and fine-tuning, LLMs can perform diverse downstream tasks based on human instructions, paving the way to artificial general intelligence (AGI)-enabled 6G. Given the great potential of LLM technologies, this work aims to provide a comprehensive overview of LLM-enabled telecom networks. In particular, we first present LLM fundamentals, including model architecture, pre-training, fine-tuning, inference and utilization, model evaluation, and telecom deployment. Then, we introduce LLM-enabled key techniques and telecom applications in terms of generation, classification, optimization, and prediction problems. Specifically, the LLM-enabled generation applications include telecom domain knowledge, code, and network configuration generation. After that, the LLM-based classification applications involve network security, text, image, and traffic classification problems. Moreover, multiple LLM-enabled optimization techniques are introduced, such as automated reward function design for reinforcement learning and verbal reinforcement learning. Furthermore, for LLM-aided prediction problems, we discussed time-series prediction models and multi-modality prediction problems for telecom. Finally, we highlight the challenges and identify the future directions of LLM-enabled telecom networks.