Interplay Between RIS and AI in Wireless Communications: Fundamentals, Architectures, Applications, and Open Research Problems

Future wireless communication networks are expected to fulfill the unprecedented performance requirements to support our highly digitized and globally data-driven society. Various technological challenges must be overcome to achieve our goal. Among many potential technologies, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and artificial intelligence (AI) have attracted extensive attention, thereby leading to a proliferation of studies for utilizing them in wireless communication systems. The RIS-based wireless communication frameworks and AI-enabled technologies, two of the promising technologies for the sixth-generation networks, interact and promote with each other, striving to collaboratively create a controllable, intelligent, reconfigurable, and programmable wireless propagation environment. This paper explores the road to implementing the combination of RIS and AI, more specifically, integrating AI-enabled technologies into RIS-based frameworks for maximizing the practicality of RIS to facilitate the realization of smart radio propagation environments, elaborated from shallow to deep insights. We begin with the basic concept and fundamental characteristics of RIS, followed by the overview of the research status of RIS. Then, we analyze the inevitable trend of RIS to be combined with AI. In particular, we focus on recent research about RIS-based architectures embedded with AI, elucidating from the intelligent structures and systems of metamaterials to the AI-embedded RIS-assisted wireless communication systems. Finally, the challenges and potential of the topic are discussed.