Large and Small Model Collaboration for Air Interface (2512.12170v1)

Abstract: Large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) have shown strong capability in wireless communications, yet existing works mainly rely on their generalized knowledge across environments while overlooking the potential gains of environment-specific adaptation. Directly fine-tuning LAMs for adaptation is often impractical due to prohibitive training costs, low inference efficiency in multi-user scenarios, and the risk of catastrophic forgetting, in addition to the limited accessibility of model parameters. To address these limitations, we establish a collaborative framework for air interface. In this framework, unlike prior approaches that either depend solely on LAMs or require direct fine-tuning, LAMs are exploited as a universal channel knowledge base while small artificial intelligence models (SAMs) are employed as lightweight plugins to capture environment-specific knowledge, facilitating efficient environment-specific adaptation of LAMs. Subsequently, we instantiate this framework for CSI feedback tasks, and develop a large and small collaboration framework for CSI feedback, referred to as LASCO. LASCO operates by letting the base LAM produce an initial CSI reconstruction, learning the environment-induced reconstruction shift through a reference SAM and a proxy SAM, and transferring this shift back to the LAM. To further enhance adaptability, we introduce elastic-LASCO (E-LASCO), which augments LASCO with learnable collaboration coefficients that control the contribution of LAMs and SAMs across different environments. Numerical results demonstrate that LASCO and E-LASCO enables LAMs to achieve environment-specific performance gains with significantly reduced training costs, lower data collection requirements, and faster adaptation speed.