A Survey on Wi-Fi Sensing Generalizability: Taxonomy, Techniques, Datasets, and Future Research Prospects

Wi-Fi sensing has emerged as a powerful non-intrusive technology for recognizing human activities, monitoring vital signs, and enabling context-aware applications using commercial wireless devices. However, the performance of Wi-Fi sensing often degrades when applied to new users, devices, or environments due to significant domain shifts. To address this challenge, researchers have proposed a wide range of generalization techniques aimed at enhancing the robustness and adaptability of Wi-Fi sensing systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and structured review of over 200 papers published since 2015, categorizing them according to the Wi-Fi sensing pipeline: experimental setup, signal preprocessing, feature learning, and model deployment. We analyze key techniques, including signal preprocessing, domain adaptation, meta-learning, metric learning, data augmentation, cross-modal alignment, federated learning, and continual learning. Furthermore, we summarize publicly available datasets across various tasks, such as activity recognition, user identification, indoor localization, and pose estimation, and provide insights into their domain diversity. We also discuss emerging trends and future directions, including large-scale pretraining, integration with multimodal foundation models, and continual deployment. To foster community collaboration, we introduce the Sensing Dataset Platform (SDP) (http://www.sdp8.org/) for sharing datasets and models. This survey aims to serve as a valuable reference and practical guide for researchers and practitioners dedicated to improving the generalizability of Wi-Fi sensing systems. Notably, while this paper focuses on Wi-Fi sensing, it is important to emphasize that the methodologies discussed in the feature learning and model deployment stages, e.g., domain alignment, metric learning, meta-learning, federated learning, and continual learning, are equally applicable to a broader range of wireless sensing generalization challenges, such as those encountered in millimeter radar-based human sensing. Given the rapid evolution of this field, we will continuously maintain and update relevant resources at https://github.com/aiotgroup/ awesome-wireless-sensing-generalization.