Researchers from Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa University and the UAE University (UAEU) have jointly released 6G-Bench, the world’s first open-source benchmark designed to evaluate foundation AI models for their reasoning capabilities within future 6G networks. This initiative aims to standardise how the global telecom industry assesses AI, paving the way for more intelligent, intent-driven network operations.
A New Standard for AI in Telecom
The 6G-Bench project directly addresses a major challenge in the telecommunications sector: the lack of a common framework for evaluating AI models. Previously, proprietary benchmarks and unverified vendor claims made it difficult for network operators and equipment manufacturers to objectively compare the capabilities of different foundation models.
By open-sourcing the entire benchmark infrastructure—including the dataset, task definitions, and evaluation scripts—the UAE-based research team is enabling any organisation to transparently and reproducibly assess large language models (LLMs) for 6G deployment. This allows stakeholders to independently verify a model’s semantic reasoning and decision-making skills before committing to large-scale integration.
Putting Foundation Models to the Test
The benchmark is a comprehensive evaluation suite, featuring 10,000 multiple-choice questions derived from over 113,000 complex network scenarios. The questions cover 30 critical decision-making tasks organised into five key categories: intent and policy reasoning, network slicing, trust and security, AI-native networking, and distributed intelligence.
In its initial research, the team evaluated 22 contemporary foundation models, ranging from open-weight to proprietary systems. The results showed a wide performance gap, with accuracy rates spanning from 22.8% to 82.9%. The study concluded that mid-scale models currently offer the best balance of accuracy, robustness, and deployability. However, it also highlighted that tasks related to trust, security, and distributed intelligence remain significant challenges that require further AI innovation.
Cementing the UAE’s Role in Global Standards
The 6G-Bench framework is grounded in established standards from major telecommunications bodies, including 3GPP, IETF, ETSI, and the O-RAN Alliance. This ensures its relevance and positions LLMs as a critical reasoning and coordination layer that interacts with standardised interfaces in next-generation networks.
This release builds on Khalifa University’s growing influence in telecommunications AI. It follows the university’s earlier work on the GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks 2.0, developed with 15 leading mobile operators. While the previous benchmark focused on current 5G operations, 6G-Bench pushes the evaluation into the future, solidifying the 6G Research Centre’s position as a key contributor to global AI standards for telecommunications.
About 6G-Bench
6G-Bench is the first open benchmark developed to evaluate semantic communication and network-level reasoning with foundation models in AI-native 6G networks. A joint project by Khalifa University’s 6G Research Centre and the UAE University’s Department of Computer and Network Engineering, it provides a transparent and reproducible framework for assessing the decision-making capabilities of LLMs for future telecom applications.
Source: Middle East AI News
