Foundation models and intelligent decision-making: Progress, challenges, and perspectives

Intelligent decision-making (IDM) is a cornerstone of artificial intelligence (AI) designed to automate or augment decision processes. Modern IDM paradigms integrate advanced frameworks to enable intelligent agents to make effective and adaptive choices and decompose complex tasks into manageable steps, such as AI agents and high-level reinforcement learning. Recent advances in multimodal foundation-based approaches unify diverse input modalities-such as vision, language, and sensory data-into a cohesive decision-making process. Foundation models (FMs) have become pivotal in science and industry, transforming decision-making and research capabilities. Their large-scale, multimodal data-processing abilities foster adaptability and interdisciplinary breakthroughs across fields such as healthcare, life sciences, and education. This survey examines IDM's evolution, advanced paradigms with FMs and their transformative impact on decision-making across diverse scientific and industrial domains, highlighting the challenges and opportunities in building efficient, adaptive, and ethical decision systems.