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

Abstract: LLMs have advanced many domains and applications but face high fine-tuning costs, inference latency, limited edge deployability, and reliability concerns. Small LLMs (SLMs), compact, efficient, and adaptable, offer complementary remedies. Recent work explores collaborative frameworks that fuse SLMs' specialization and efficiency with LLMs' generalization and reasoning to meet diverse objectives across tasks and deployment scenarios. Motivated by these developments, this paper presents a systematic survey of SLM-LLM collaboration organized by collaboration objectives. We propose a taxonomy with four goals: performance enhancement, cost-effectiveness, cloud-edge privacy, and trustworthiness. Within this framework, we review representative methods, summarize design paradigms, and outline open challenges and future directions toward efficient, secure, and scalable SLM-LLM collaboration.