# RadarPLM: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for Marine Radar Target Detection by Selective Fine-tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12089/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Prioritized Training on Points that are Learnable, Worth Learning, and Not Yet Learnt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07137/) (2022)
- [Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16964/) (2024)
- [UniTime: A Language-Empowered Unified Model for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09751/) (2023)
- [Rho-1: Not All Tokens Are What You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07965/) (2024)
- [Penetrative AI: Making LLMs Comprehend the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09605/) (2023)
- [LLM4CP: Adapting Large Language Models for Channel Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14440/) (2024)
- [Beam Prediction based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08707/) (2024)
- [IoT-LLM: a framework for enhancing Large Language Model reasoning from real-world sensor data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02429/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Enabled Multi-Task Physical Layer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20772/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated their capabilities in capturing universal knowledge, making them promising for radar signal processing applications. Nevertheless, directly fine-tuning PLMs on radar signals is both computationally expensive and prone to overfitting, particularly in low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) environments. To mitigate both issues, an effective fine-tuning framework for PLM-based marine radar target detection is proposed. First, we design a lightweight adaptation module, enabling computationally efficient fine-tuning while preserving the pre-trained model's general knowledge. Second, an effective selective fine-tuning strategy is developed to selectively optimize different feature patches based on their online-evaluated learning values, guiding the model to concentrate on those generalizable feature patterns and significantly reducing model overfitting to nosiy, anomalous, or overly simple patterns during optimization. Finally, a binary classification head is retrained based on autoencoder network to further enhance detection performance. Evaluations on real-world radar datasets highlight that the proposed RadarPLM framework considerably outperforms existing models, achieving a minimum of 6.35% gain in average detection performance under challenging low SCR conditions when using sequence features. In particular, under small-sample training conditions, RadarPLM also achieves highly significant average performance gains over prior methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating the PLM.