When Does Multimodal AI Help? Diagnostic Complementarity of Vision-Language Models and CNNs for Spectrum Management in Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

arXiv:2604.03774v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of vision-language models (VLMs) for wireless network management is accelerating, yet no systematic understanding exists of where these large foundation models outperform lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for spectrum-related tasks. This paper presents the first diagnostic comparison of VLMs and CNNs for spectrum heatmap understanding in non-terrestrial network and terrestrial network (NTN-TN) cooperative systems. We i