# Towards Foundational Models for Single-Chip Radar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16264/) (2023)
- [The Oxford Radar RobotCar Dataset: A Radar Extension to the Oxford RobotCar Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01300/) (2019)
- [K-Radar: 4D Radar Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Various Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08171/) (2022)
- [RADIATE: A Radar Dataset for Automotive Perception in Bad Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09076/) (2020)
- [Boreas: A Multi-Season Autonomous Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10168/) (2022)
- [Raw High-Definition Radar for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10646/) (2021)
- [CARRADA Dataset: Camera and Automotive Radar with Range-Angle-Doppler Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01456/) (2020)
- [RADDet: Range-Azimuth-Doppler based Radar Object Detection for Dynamic Road Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00363/) (2021)
- [CNN based Road User Detection using the 3D Radar Cube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12165/) (2020)
- [Localization Is All You Evaluate: Data Leakage in Online Mapping Datasets and How to Fix It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06420/) (2023)
- [Multi-View Radar Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16214/) (2021)
- [RadarOcc: Robust 3D Occupancy Prediction with 4D Imaging Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14014/) (2024)
- [RAMP-CNN: A Novel Neural Network for Enhanced Automotive Radar Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08981/) (2020)
- [T-FFTRadNet: Object Detection with Swin Vision Transformers from Raw ADC Radar Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16940/) (2023)
- [High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09273/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [RLM: A Vision-Language Model Approach for Radar Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21105/) (2025)
- [On Learning Spatial Structure from Pre-Beamforming Per-Antenna Range-Doppler Radar Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01921/) (2026)
- [Rascene: High-Fidelity 3D Scene Imaging with mmWave Communication Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02603/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Radar Perception With Spectral Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08282/) (2026)
- [GRADE: Single-Frame Generative Radar Depth Estimation Under Visual Degradation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10756/) (2026)
- [4D Radar Perception Algorithms for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19216/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

mmWave radars are compact, inexpensive, and durable sensors that are robust to occlusions and work regardless of environmental conditions, such as weather and darkness. However, this comes at the cost of poor angular resolution, especially for inexpensive single-chip radars, which are typically used in automotive and indoor sensing applications. Although many have proposed learning-based methods to mitigate this weakness, no standardized foundational models or large datasets for the mmWave radar have emerged, and practitioners have largely trained task-specific models from scratch using relatively small datasets. In this paper, we collect (to our knowledge) the largest available raw radar dataset with 1M samples (29 hours) and train a foundational model for 4D single-chip radar, which can predict 3D occupancy and semantic segmentation with quality that is typically only possible with much higher resolution sensors. We demonstrate that our Generalizable Radar Transformer (GRT) generalizes across diverse settings, can be fine-tuned for different tasks, and shows logarithmic data scaling of 20% per 10× data. We also run extensive ablations on common design decisions, and find that using raw radar data significantly outperforms widely-used lossy representations, equivalent to a 10× increase in training data. Finally, we roughly estimate that ≈100M samples (3000 hours) of data are required to fully exploit the potential of GRT.