# Talk Less, Fly Lighter: Autonomous Semantic Compression for UAV Swarm Communication via LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12043/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Say the Mission, Execute the Swarm: Agent-Enhanced LLM Reasoning in the Web-of-Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03788/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in unmanned systems has significantly enhanced the semantic understanding and autonomous task execution capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms. However, limited communication bandwidth and the need for high-frequency interactions pose severe challenges to semantic information transmission within the swarm. This paper explores the feasibility of LLM-driven UAV swarms for autonomous semantic compression communication, aiming to reduce communication load while preserving critical task semantics. To this end, we construct four types of 2D simulation scenarios with different levels of environmental complexity and design a communication-execution pipeline that integrates system prompts with task instruction prompts. On this basis, we systematically evaluate the semantic compression performance of nine mainstream LLMs in different scenarios and analyze their adaptability and stability through ablation studies on environmental complexity and swarm size. Experimental results demonstrate that LLM-based UAV swarms have the potential to achieve efficient collaborative communication under bandwidth-constrained and multi-hop link conditions.