Adapting Foundation Models for Information Synthesis of Wireless Communication Specifications

Researchers, practitioners, engineers and students can find themselves grappling with a multitude of acronyms and intricate terminology with information spread across a large number of documents, which can prove to be an onerous and time-consuming task to work with and develop standards-compliant systems. For example, an engineering team working on implementing registration request procedure as a part of building 5G virtual core would need to identify all the relevant technical specifications from among thousands of such documents, and understand the call flow and message formats as described in those specifications. Table 1 provides several examples of such user stories. The current method of acquiring this information involves sifting through numerous webpages and technical specification documents. While this approach provides extensive comprehension of a topic from various sources, it can also be very time-intensive and tedious to identify multiple relevant sources, gather information from them and synthesize it [22]. The emergence of foundation models [6] like ChatGPT [35] presents a promising prospect for solving this problem as they represent a significant advancement in providing synthesized, readily comprehensible answers to user queries related to wireless communication specifications and technologies. However, despite the usefulness of state-of-the-art foundation large language models (LLMs) in answering many queries related to modern wireless communication technologies, they offer irrelevant or inaccurate responses to many of these queries. For example, as shown in Figure 1(a), when prompted about'what is numerology in 5G', ChatGPT (Feb 2023) describes that numerology is related to mystical significance of numbers and has no connection to 5G. Similarly, when prompted about'the number of unique values physical identity can take in 5G', it responds that'PCI consists of a 3-bit value ranging from 0 to 503', which is inaccurate and also non-sensible as 3-bit value cannot take 504 different values.