# Local-First Intelligence via Proactive SLM Collaborating with Feedback-Providing LLM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17827 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17827/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01680/) (2024)
- [RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18665/) (2024)
- [Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10264/) (2022)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02716/) (2024)
- [Hybrid LLM: Cost-Efficient and Quality-Aware Query Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14618/) (2024)
- [VAPO: Efficient and Reliable Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05118/) (2025)
- [Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16487/) (2022)
- [Open Problems in Cooperative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08630/) (2020)
- [Large Language Model Cascades with Mixture of Thoughts Representations for Cost-efficient Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03094/) (2023)
- [Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Collaboration via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10701/) (2023)
- [AutoMix: Automatically Mixing Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12963/) (2023)
- [Examining Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models Collaboration: An In-depth Analysis via Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11595/) (2023)
- [RouterDC: Query-Based Router by Dual Contrastive Learning for Assembling Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19886/) (2024)
- [Router-R1: Teaching LLMs Multi-Round Routing and Aggregation via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09033/) (2025)
- [PAPILLON: Privacy Preservation from Internet-based and Local Language Model Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17127/) (2024)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models via Multi-Agent Peer Review Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08152/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Knowing When Thinking Is Not Enough: Teaching Small Reasoning Models to Reason Beyond Their Parametric Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34327/) (2026)
- [Learning to Ask: Information Acquisition for SLM-LLM Collaboration, under a budget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01236/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personal intelligence requires strong capabilities under strict privacy and efficiency constraints. Unlike cloud-first intelligence, which relies on powerful but costly and privacy-vulnerable large language models (LLMs), we focus on local-first intelligence, emphasizing on-device small language models (SLMs), which enable efficient, private inference but have limited capacity. To reconcile the capability gap with privacy and efficiency, we propose a dynamic collaboration framework, where an SLM learns to proactively decide how to consult an LLM during multi-step reasoning, while the LLM provides adaptive feedback instead of acting as a passive tool, modeling them as heterogeneous agents under information asymmetry. We further systematically investigate how collaboration strategies are shaped by SLM and LLM capabilities as well as efficiency and privacy constraints. Evaluation results reveal a distinct scaling effect: stronger SLMs become more self-reliant, while stronger LLMs enable fewer and more informative interactions. In addition, the learned dynamic collaboration strategies significantly outperform various baselines and transfer robustly to unseen LLMs as well as to real-world personal tasks without additional training.