2026-10-13T06:57:24Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34018875 2026-09-29T01:21:33Z category_35576 category_35549 category_35678 portal_1005 item_type_14 month_year_09_2026

Large or Small? Cloud or Edge? Investigating the Use of Language Models for Smart Drone Services P He (13605466) Xiao Liu (13082469) J Xu (6794354) Jonathan Kua (13076283) D Jia (11040498) Artificial intelligence Information and computing sciences Data management and data science Uncategorised value In recent years, smart drone services are becoming increasingly popular in many industries such as logistics, construction, agriculture, and renewable energy. Due to the requirements of various drone applications and their complex operational environments, smart drone services often require powerful reasoning capabilities for autonomous decision making. While large language models (LLMs) have proven their strong reasoning capabilities, an open question remains is that whether we should use LLMs in the cloud, or adapt and deploy small language models (SLMs) at the edge, to support the special needs of smart drone services. To answer this question, we create a set of structured drone reasoning tasks and adapt a small student model using teacher-generated supervision with QLoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our experiments are designed to evaluate model performance from three perspectives: accuracy, key constraint coverage, and generalization ability. The results show that task-oriented adaptation can improve the performance of edge SLMs for specialized drone reasoning tasks, but their performance on general reasoning tasks is less effective compared with cloud LLMs. We hope the outcome presented in this paper can motivate the service community to further investigate how to effectively facilitate the collaboration between cloud LLMs and edge SLMs to support the growing demand of smart drone services. All artifacts for this work including the code and dataset have been made publicly available. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Text Conference contribution 10.26187/deakin.34018875 https://figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Large_or_Small_Cloud_or_Edge_Investigating_the_Use_of_Language_Models_for_Smart_Drone_Services/34018875 All Rights Reserved