A Survey on Collaborating Small and Large Language Models for Performance, Cost-effectiveness, Cloud-edge Privacy, and Trustworthiness

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across domains and applications but face challenges such as high fine-tuning costs, inference latency, limited edge deployability, and reliability concerns. Small language models (SLMs), with compact, efficient, and adaptable features, offer promising solutions. Building on this potential, recent research explores collaborative frameworks that integrate their complementary strengths, leveraging SLMs' specialization and efficiency with LLMs' generalization and reasoning to address diverse objectives across tasks and deployment scenarios. Motivated by these developments, this paper presents a systematic survey of SLM-LLM collaboration from the perspective of collaboration objectives. We propose a taxonomy covering four goals: performance enhancement, cost-effectiveness, cloud-edge privacy, and trustworthiness. Under this framework, we review representative methods, summarize design paradigms, and outline open challenges and future directions toward efficient and secure SLM-LLM collaboration. The collected papers are available at https://github.com/FairyFali/SLMs-Survey.