ruvnet--RuView/docs/research/ruview-beyond-sota/01-sota-landscape-2026.md

SOTA Landscape 2026 — The Bar a Beyond-SOTA RuView Must Clear

Series: ruview-beyond-sota (01) Date: 2026-06-09 Status: Research survey / target definition Builds on (does not duplicate): docs/research/sota-2026-05-22/00-summary.md (physics floors, placement, privacy chain), docs/research/BFLD/01-sota-survey.md (beamforming-feedback leakage SOTA), docs/research/neural-decoding/21-sota-neural-decoding-landscape.md (sensor-fidelity framing), docs/research/rf-topological-sensing/00-rf-topological-sensing-index.md (mincut/topology resolution limits), ADR-150 (RF foundation encoder + measured MM-Fi campaign), ADR-147 (OccWorld benchmark proof).

0. Evidence legend

Every claim in this document carries one of three tags. No RuView benchmark number in this document is invented; all RuView numbers come from repo-internal measured artifacts.

Tag	Meaning
[V]	Verified in this session via web search (June 2026); source linked in §8
[K]	Training-knowledge claim (pre-2026 literature); plausible but not re-verified — treat as needing citation check before external publication
[I]	Internal RuView measurement or artifact (ADR, issue, witness bundle) — measured, not literature

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1. SOTA reference table per capability axis

1.1 Pose estimation (WiFi CSI)

Method	Year	Metric	Dataset / protocol	Tag
DensePose From WiFi (Geng, Huang, De la Torre)	2023	Dense-pose UV regions from CSI, "comparable to image-based approaches" (same-layout); commonly cited AP≈43.5 / AP@50≈87.2	3×3 antenna, single-layout lab	exact AP numbers [K]; paper existence [V] (arXiv 2301.00250)
MetaFi++ (Zhou et al.)	2023	PCK@50 = 97.30% same-domain real-world (MetaFi: 95.23%); drops to 81.7–86.5% under stricter protocols	Own capture; protocol-sensitive	[V]
Person-in-WiFi 3D (CVPR 2024)	2024	End-to-end multi-person 3D; 20.4 M params, 54 FPS; MPJPE ≈ 90–100 mm on own dataset	Own multi-person dataset	FPS/params [V]; MPJPE range [K]
GraphPose-Fi (arXiv 2511.19105)	2025	SOTA on MM-Fi random split: MPJPE 160.6 mm, best PCK at all thresholds	MM-Fi, random split (S1)	[V]
CSDS (Electronics 14(4):756)	2025	Wi-Pose: PCK@5 = 0.6407, PCK@50 = 0.8824	Wi-Pose	[V]
PerceptAlign (arXiv 2601.12252)	2026	Cross-layout 3D: MPJPE 222.4 mm (Scene 4) / 317.1 mm (Scene 5), >54% better than prior cross-layout SOTA; in easier settings MPJPE 181.5 mm, PCK@20/50 = 44.2/79.5	Cross-layout protocol	[V]
WiFlow (arXiv 2602.08661)	2026	Lightweight continuous HPE, spatio-temporal decoupling	—	[V] (existence; numbers not extracted)
RuView / AetherArena	2026	81.63% torso-PCK@20 in-domain (random split), beating MultiFormer's 72.25% on metric/protocol-matched MM-Fi; leakage-free cross-subject collapses to ~11.6% torso-PCK zero-shot; official-split harness baseline ~63–65% PCK@20; 11 KB LoRA few-shot calibration → 72.5%	MM-Fi (issue #876, ADR-150 §3)	[I]

The honest reading of the pose axis: same-domain WiFi pose is "solved-looking" (PCK@50 in the 90s) and meaningless for deployment. The 2025–2026 literature has shifted to cross-layout/cross-subject protocols, where numbers collapse (PerceptAlign PCK@20 = 44.2 cross-layout [V]; RuView cross-subject zero-shot 11.6% [I]). ADR-150's measured finding — that the cross-subject gap is subject-distribution shift, not an algorithmic gap, and that few-shot in-room calibration (5–200 frames) closes it — is ahead of where the published literature is: no published WiFi-pose paper we found ships a per-room ~11 KB adapter calibration mechanism. [I]

1.2 Presence / person count

Method	Year	Metric	Tag
Large-scale commodity router deployment (>10 M routers)	2025	92.6% motion-detection accuracy across diverse homes	[V] (ISAC survey, arXiv 2510.14358)
LeakyBeam (NDSS 2025)	2025	Occupancy through walls at 20 m from plaintext BFI alone: TPR 82.7%, TNR 96.7%	[V] (also in BFLD survey §4.2)
Time-Selective RNN multi-room presence (arXiv 2304.13107)	2023	Device-free multi-room presence from CSI	[V] (existence)
Academic person counting (0–5 occupants, lab)	2020–2024	typically 90–97% exact-count accuracy, degrading sharply >5 people	[K]
RuView	2026	cog-person-count ships with calibrated uncertainty (count_p95_low/high); multistatic placement recipe with 100% coverage for 1–4 occupants at N=5 nodes (synthetic physics)	[I] (sota-2026-05-22 R6.2.5, ADR-113)

1.3 Vital signs (HR / BR)

Method	Year	Metric	Tag
PhaseBeat (ACM Health)	2020	HR median error 1.19 bpm; BR median error 0.25 breaths/min	[V]
MDPI Sensors 24(7):2111 non-contact HR	2024	HR accuracy 96.8%, median error 0.8 bpm	[V]
PulseFi (arXiv 2510.24744)	2025	Low-cost ML cardiopulmonary + apnea monitoring from CSI	[V] (existence; numbers not extracted)
mmWave FMCW vitals (60 GHz class)	2023–2026	HR MAE typically 1–3 bpm at 1–3 m, single subject; age-balanced reference dataset published (Sci Data 2026)	dataset [V]; MAE range [K]
Contactless blood pressure (WiFi-band)	—	NEGATIVE — below classical physics floor; recoverable only via quantum magnetometry path	[I] (R13/R20 arc, ADR-114)
RuView	2026	wifi-densepose-vitals (ADR-021) extracts HR/BR from ESP32 CSI; chest-centric placement gives +27 pp coverage for vitals cogs (synthetic)	[I] — no accuracy-vs-ECG validation number exists in-repo yet; do not claim one

Bar: published single-subject, line-of-sight, 1–3 m WiFi HR is ~0.8–1.2 bpm median error [V]. Nobody credibly publishes multi-person, through-wall, walking-subject HR at that accuracy — that is open territory.

1.4 Localization (ToA / CRLB)

Method	Year	Metric	Tag
802.11mc FTM	shipped	1–2 m typical accuracy	[V] (FTM survey, arXiv 2509.03901)
802.11az (+ 802.11bk)	released	sub-1 m, 160 MHz channels, secured ranging, HE-LTF repetitions	[V]
AI single-link decimeter localization	2025	0.63 m average error single-link, beating Widar2.0 / Dynamic-MUSIC	[V]
SpotFi / Chronos / Widar lineage	2015–2021	0.4–1 m with multi-AP CSI AoA/ToF	[K]
RuView	2026	CRLB / Fisher-information machinery in ruvector/src/viewpoint/geometry.rs; tomography ISTA voxel grid; theoretical limits derived internally: 30–60 cm at 16 nodes/1 m spacing, 8.8 cm information-theoretic dense limit	[I] (rf-topological-sensing doc 09 — synthetic derivations, no bench numbers)

1.5 Through-wall

Method	Year	Metric	Tag
RF-Pose / RF-Pose3D (MIT, FMCW 5.4–7.2 GHz)	2018	Through-wall skeletal pose, ~specialized radar not commodity WiFi	[K]
Commodity 2.4 GHz through-wall imaging (arXiv 1903.03895)	2019	Coarse imaging through walls with commodity WiFi	[V] (existence)
Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) lineage	2010–2013	Through-wall tracking via RSS networks, ~0.5–1 m tracking error	[V] (papers) / error figure [K]
LeakyBeam (NDSS 2025)	2025	Through-wall occupancy at 20 m, passive, commodity	[V]
RuView	2026	RF tomography module (tomography.rs, ISTA L1 voxel solver) + CIR (ADR-134) exist as code; PABS structure detection: 1,161× static / 9.36× dynamic intruder lift (synthetic)	[I]

Notably, the 2025–2026 web literature shows through-wall pose (not just presence) on commodity WiFi remains essentially where it was in 2019 — no verified commodity-WiFi through-wall pose benchmark surfaced in our searches. The frontier moved to privacy attacks (BFI) instead.

1.6 Identity / re-ID (capability and threat simultaneously)

Method	Year	Metric	Tag
BFId (KIT, ACM CCS 2025)	2025	~99.5% (near-100%) re-ID across 197 subjects from beamforming feedback alone, ≥5 s of BFI	[V] (also BFLD survey §4.1)
Transformer CSI identification	2025	99.82% on stationary subjects	[V]
WhoFi (arXiv 2507.12869)	2025	Deep person re-ID via WiFi channel encoding, ~95% rank-1 class results	existence [V]; exact number [K]
Wi-Gait	2023	92.9% over 10 subjects, robust to walking cofactors	[V]
RuView	2026	AETHER contrastive re-ID embeddings (ADR-024) in pose tracker; BFLD: first defensive identity-leak detector (identity_risk_score) — the literature attacks, RuView audits	[I]

1.7 Adjacent modality: mmWave radar (the accuracy ceiling WiFi is chasing)

Method	Year	Metric	Tag
mmChainPose	2025	27.0 mm MPJPE / 0.8706 OKS on MARS (mmWave point cloud)	[V]
ProbRadarM3F (arXiv 2405.05164)	2024–25	SOTA AP across joints, probability-map fusion	[V]
Seeed MR60BHA2-class 60 GHz FMCW	shipped	Commodity $15 HR/BR/presence module — already in RuView's hardware table	[I]

mmWave is ~6× better than the best WiFi MPJPE (27 mm vs 160 mm) [V]. The strategic implication: WiFi will not beat mmWave on raw geometry; it wins on ubiquity, cost, through-wall propagation, and standardized waveforms (§2). RuView already hedges with the ESP32-C6 + MR60BHA2 fusion node. [I]

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2. IEEE 802.11bf — status and implications

Status (verified): IEEE 802.11bf-2025 is ratified and published (IEEE SA lists the amendment; ratification late 2024 / publication 2025) [V]. It amends MAC/PHY of HE (Wi-Fi 6) and EHT (Wi-Fi 7) plus DMG/EDMG (60 GHz) to support WLAN sensing in 1–7.125 GHz and >45 GHz bands [V]. The Wi-Fi Alliance has Wi-Fi Sensing as an active certification work area built on 802.11bf (presence/proximity, gestures, vital signs) [V]. Market reports claim >47 chipset vendors with 802.11bf-compatible programs as of early 2026 — single weak source, treat as directional [V, low confidence].

What it implies for RuView:

1. Sounding-on-demand becomes standard. 802.11bf defines a sensing-measurement procedure (sensing initiator/responder, trigger-based sounding, threshold-based reporting). Today RuView relies on Espressif's vendor CSI API and Nexmon firmware patches; post-bf, commodity Wi-Fi 7 silicon will expose scheduled sensing measurements without firmware hacks. The rvCSI normalized CsiFrame schema is the right abstraction layer to absorb a future bf adapter (rvcsi-adapter-*). [I]
2. The moat moves up the stack. When every router can sense, raw CSI access stops being differentiating. Differentiators become: multistatic fusion, coherence gating / anti-hallucination, calibration mechanisms, witness-grade verification, and privacy auditing — exactly RuView's existing bets (ADR-029/135/150/028, BFLD). [I]
3. Privacy pressure intensifies. 802.11bf standardizes the capability that BFId/LeakyBeam exploit. BFLD's identity-leak detection and the ADR-105–109 privacy/PQC chain become regulatory assets, not nice-to-haves. [V]+[I]
4. Threshold-based reporting in bf (report only when channel changes exceed threshold) is architecturally the same idea as RuView's coherence gate — validation that the gate belongs at the protocol layer. [K] (bf reporting detail from training knowledge)

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3. RF foundation model landscape ("GPT for RF")

Verified 2025–2026 attempts, all young, none dominant:

Model	Approach	Downstream tasks	Tag
LWM (Large Wireless Model)	Pretrained on large-scale CSI → general channel embeddings	LoS/NLoS, beats raw features in low-data regimes	[V]
LatentWave (arXiv 2606.06373)	JEPA pretraining on wireless spectrograms + CSI	RF classification, 5G NR positioning, beam prediction, LoS/NLoS	[V]
WirelessJEPA (arXiv 2601.20190)	Multi-antenna spatio-temporal latent prediction	Cross-task transfer	[V]
IQFM	Contrastive SSL on raw I/Q	Modulation classification, beam prediction, RF fingerprinting, few-shot	[V]
Multimodal Wireless FMs (arXiv 2511.15162), WMFM (arXiv 2512.23897), SoM (arXiv 2506.07647)	Vision + RF multimodal for 6G ISAC	Sensing-communication integration	[V]
DeepSig OmniSIG	Commercial AI-native RF sensing, 500 MHz/GPU spectrum	Signal ID (LTE/5G/Wi-Fi)	[V]

Critical observation: every verified RF foundation model targets communication-side tasks (beam prediction, LoS/NLoS, modulation, positioning). None of them is a human-sensing foundation model — none pretrains for pose/vitals/identity invariances. ADR-150's measured negative result is the sharpest data point in this space: pose-contrastive pretraining across subjects failed on MM-Fi because the invariance is not in the data (loss never left the ln(B) floor) [I]. The literature has not yet published this failure mode; the field's "GPT for RF sensing" narrative is ahead of its evidence. The defensible foundation-model objective (per ADR-150 §3.5–3.6) is reduce few-shot calibration cost, not zero-shot invariance. [I]

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4. "Beyond SOTA" for RuView — precise definition

Targets below are bar definitions, not claims. RuView numbers in the "current" column are measured [I]; targets must be proven via the AetherArena witness protocol (ADR-149) before being asserted anywhere.

Capability	Published SOTA (2026)	RuView measured today	RuView beyond-SOTA target	Key obstacle
Pose, in-domain (MM-Fi)	GraphPose-Fi 160.6 mm MPJPE; MultiFormer 72.25% torso-PCK@20 [V]	81.63% torso-PCK@20 (already > published) [I]	Hold #1 under leakage-free audit + per-joint tables published with witness rows	Protocol fragmentation; reviewers distrust WiFi-pose numbers
Pose, cross-subject zero-shot	~collapse everywhere; PerceptAlign PCK@20 44.2 cross-layout [V]	11.6% torso zero-shot; 63–65% in-harness official split [I]	Stop chasing it (measured dead end); instead few-shot frontier below	Subject-distribution shift is in the data, not the model (ADR-150 §3.2)
Pose, deployment calibration	No published per-room adapter mechanism found	11 KB LoRA, 100–200 frames → 72.5%; cross-env K=5 → 60.1% [I]	≤20 frames → ≥70% PCK@20, adapter ≤11 KB, 30 s on-site; publish as the first calibration-service benchmark	Needs diverse-room capture fleet to validate beyond MM-Fi
Presence/motion (commodity)	92.6% across 10 M routers [V]	Synthetic placement recipe 100% coverage N=5 [I]	≥99% presence with calibrated p95 bounds on $6–15 ESP32 mesh, bench-validated	All placement numbers are synthetic; Tier-2.3 bench validation outstanding
Person count	~90–97% lab, ≤5 people [K]	cog ships uncertainty intervals [I]	Exact count 1–6 people ≥95% with honest intervals, multistatic, real bench	Multi-person CSI superposition; no public multi-occupancy benchmark
Vital signs HR	0.8–1.2 bpm median, single subject, LoS, 1–3 m [V]	No in-repo ECG-validated number — must not be claimed	≤1.5 bpm MAE vs ECG ground truth, multi-person or through-wall, witness-bundled	R13 physics floor: ~5 dB shortfall at distance; needs chest-centric placement + PABS
Vital signs BP	NEGATIVE at WiFi band (matches internal R13)	nvsim quantum path only [I]	First validated quantum-classical fused bedside vitals (ADR-114)	NV-diamond hardware maturity, 2028+
Localization	0.63 m single-link AI; sub-1 m 802.11az [V]	CRLB machinery, no bench number [I]	≤30 cm multistatic on ESP32 mesh (internal theory says feasible at N=16)	ESP32 clock sync / phase offset (TDM protocol exists, unproven at this accuracy)
Through-wall	Occupancy yes (LeakyBeam); commodity pose: nothing credible [V]	tomography + CIR code, PABS 9.36× lift (synthetic) [I]	First witnessed commodity-WiFi through-wall person localization (not pose) ≤1 m	Wall attenuation eats the R6.1 4.7 dB multi-scatterer budget
Identity / re-ID	~99.5% @ 197 subjects (attack) [V]	AETHER + BFLD defensive auditing (no published competitor) [I]	Ship the first identity-leak risk score with DP budget hook; keep re-ID opt-in only	Calibrating risk score at 802.11ax 4/2-bit quantization (BFLD open Q2)
Verification	Nothing comparable published — no WiFi-sensing paper ships deterministic re-verification	ADR-028 witness bundles, SHA-256 proof, 7/7 self-verify, 1,031+ tests [I]	Make witness-grade reproduction the expected standard: every public claim = one-command verification	Community adoption, not technology
Foundation encoder	Comms-task FMs only (LWM/JEPA family) [V]	Masked-CSI + coherence head planned; pose-contrastive refuted [I]	First sensing FM whose acceptance metric is calibration-sample reduction (frames-to-72% halved)	SSL must match production CSI pipeline (ADR-149 resampling risk)

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5. Where RuView already matches/exceeds published work

1. In-domain MM-Fi pose — 81.63% torso-PCK@20 vs MultiFormer 72.25%, metric- and protocol-matched (issue #876). [I]
2. Deployment-calibration mechanism — the 11 KB LoRA per-room adapter with measured frames-to-accuracy curves (§3.4–3.6 of ADR-150) has no published equivalent; the literature is still arguing about zero-shot generalization that ADR-150 measured to be a data property.
3. Deterministic witness verification — ADR-028's SHA-256 pipeline proof + self-verifying bundles exceeds the reproducibility practice of every WiFi-sensing paper surveyed (none ship deterministic re-verification).
4. Multistatic cost point — $6–15/node ESP32 mesh with TDM sync, channel hopping, placement recipes (ADR-113) vs literature setups using Intel 5300/AX210 laptops or USRPs; ~$30/bed vs $3,000 clinical monitor framing (R16).
5. Defensive identity auditing (BFLD) — the field publishes attacks (BFId, LeakyBeam, WhoFi); RuView is building the only detector/auditor, plus a PQC-hardened federation privacy chain (ADR-105–109) with no published counterpart.
6. Anti-hallucination coherence gating — confidence gated by RF integrity (ADR-135, ADR-150 §2.4); WiFi-pose papers uniformly lack a "the model knows when the channel is bad" signal.
7. Negative-result discipline — physics floors (R13 BP, R6.1 4.7 dB), refuted pose-contrastive pretraining — published SOTA papers do not report these, which inflates the apparent literature bar.

6. Where RuView lags

1. Bench validation — nearly all multistatic/placement/tomography numbers are synthetic-physics; the 92.6%-on-10M-routers deployment [V] is real-world evidence at a scale RuView cannot approach.
2. Vital-sign ground truth — no in-repo ECG/respiration-belt validated HR/BR error; published work has 0.8 bpm median [V]. This is the most urgent claim gap.
3. Raw geometric accuracy — mmWave (27 mm MPJPE [V]) and even best-WiFi MPJPE (160.6 mm [V]) have no RuView MPJPE counterpart published; AetherArena reports PCK only.
4. 802.11bf-native capture — RuView is on vendor CSI APIs and Nexmon patches; no bf sensing-procedure adapter exists yet in rvCSI.
5. Multi-person pose — Person-in-WiFi-3D does end-to-end multi-person at 54 FPS [V]; RuView's pose path is effectively single-person (multi-person exists only in count/placement work).
6. Dataset scale and diversity — MM-Fi only; ADR-150 §3.3 shows the binding constraint is room/device/protocol diversity, which requires the capture fleet that doesn't exist yet.

7. Strategic synthesis

The 2026 bar is bimodal: lab in-domain numbers are saturated (PCK@50 > 95%, HR < 1 bpm) and deployment numbers are collapsed (cross-layout PCK@20 ≈ 44, zero-shot cross-subject ≈ 11%). 802.11bf-2025 commoditizes raw sensing; foundation models commoditize comms-side embeddings. "Beyond SOTA" for RuView is therefore not a leaderboard delta — it is owning the three layers the field hasn't built: (a) witnessed, deterministic, leakage-audited evaluation; (b) the few-shot calibration service (11 KB adapters) as the deployment answer the zero-shot literature lacks; (c) the privacy/integrity layer (BFLD + coherence gate) that 802.11bf-era regulation will demand. Each row in §4's target table is gated on the AetherArena witness protocol — a target becomes a claim only when it ships with a one-command reproduction.

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8. Verified sources (accessed 2026-06-09 via web search)

Pose: GraphPose-Fi · PerceptAlign / cross-layout · CSDS · Person-in-WiFi 3D · DensePose From WiFi · MetaFi++ · WiFlow Vitals: PhaseBeat · Non-contact HR (Sensors 24:2111) · PulseFi · mmWave vitals dataset (Sci Data) Localization: FTM survey 802.11mc/az/bk · Decimeter single-link · SelfLoc 802.11az 802.11bf: IEEE SA 802.11bf-2025 · TGbf · NIST overview · Wi-Fi Alliance work areas · ISAC survey (10M-router 92.6%) Identity: BFId / KIT CCS 2025 coverage · WhoFi · Wi-Gait · LeakyBeam NDSS 2025 Through-wall: RTI through-wall · Commodity 2.4 GHz imaging · Multi-room presence Foundation models: LatentWave · WirelessJEPA · Multimodal Wireless FMs · WMFM · SoM · RF-native AI / LWM, IQFM, OmniSIG mmWave: mmChainPose · ProbRadarM3F

Internal [I] sources: ADR-150 (§1, §3.2–3.6), ADR-147, ADR-028, ADR-113/114, issue #876, docs/research/sota-2026-05-22/00-summary.md, docs/research/BFLD/01-sota-survey.md, docs/research/rf-topological-sensing/.