Hybrid Distillation with CoT Guidance for Edge-Drone Control Code Generation

With large language models demonstrating significant potential in code generation tasks, their application to onboard control of resource-constrained Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has emerged as an important research direction. However, a notable contradiction exists between the high resource consumption of large models and the real-time, lightweight requirements of UAV platforms. This paper proposes an integrated approach that combines knowledge distillation, chain-of-thought guidance, and supervised fine-tuning for UAV multi-SDK control tasks, aiming to efficiently transfer complex reasoning and code generation capabilities to smaller models. Firstly, a high-quality dataset covering various mainstream UAV SDKs is constructed, featuring instruction-code-reasoning chains, and incorporates counterfactual negative samples for data augmentation, guiding the model to learn the end-to-end logic from instruction parsing to code generation. Secondly, leveraging DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite quantized via QLoRA as the teacher model, and based on a hybrid black-box and white-box distillation strategy, high-quality chain-of-thought soft labels are generated. These are combined with a weighted cross-entropy loss using hard labels to transfer complex reasoning capabilities to the smaller student model. Finally, through prompt tuning engineering optimized for the UAV control scenario, the model performance on core tasks such as SDK type recognition and function call matching is enhanced. Experimental results indicate that the distilled lightweight model maintains high code generation accuracy while achieving significant improvements in deployment and inference efficiency, effectively demonstrating the feasibility and superiority of our approach in achieving precise and lightweight intelligent control for UAVs

Edge-Optimized Multimodal Learning for UAV Video Understanding via BLIP-2

The demand for real-time visual understanding and interaction in complex scenarios is increasingly critical for unmanned aerial vehicles. However, a significant challenge arises from the contradiction between the high computational cost of large Vision language models and the limited computing resources available on UAV edge devices. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a lightweight multimodal task platform based on BLIP-2, integrated with YOLO-World and YOLOv8-Seg models. This integration extends the multi-task capabilities of BLIP-2 for UAV applications with minimal adaptation and without requiring task-specific fine-tuning on drone data. Firstly, the deep integration of BLIP-2 with YOLO models enables it to leverage the precise perceptual results of YOLO for fundamental tasks like object detection and instance segmentation, thereby facilitating deeper visual-attention understanding and reasoning. Secondly, a content-aware key frame sampling mechanism based on K-Means clustering is designed, which incorporates intelligent frame selection and temporal feature concatenation. This equips the lightweight BLIP-2 architecture with the capability to handle video-level interactive tasks effectively. Thirdly, a unified prompt optimization scheme for multi-task adaptation is implemented. This scheme strategically injects structured event logs from the YOLO models as contextual information into BLIP-2's input. Combined with output constraints designed to filter out technical details, this approach effectively guides the model to generate accurate and contextually relevant outputs for various tasks.

Large Language Models to Enhance Multi-task Drone Operations in Simulated Environments

Benefiting from the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), human-drone interaction has reached unprecedented opportunities. In this paper, we propose a method that integrates a fine-tuned CodeT5 model with the Unreal Engine-based AirSim drone simulator to efficiently execute multi-task operations using natural language commands. This approach enables users to interact with simulated drones through prompts or command descriptions, allowing them to easily access and control the drone's status, significantly lowering the operational threshold. In the AirSim simulator, we can flexibly construct visually realistic dynamic environments to simulate drone applications in complex scenarios. By combining a large dataset of (natural language, program code) command-execution pairs generated by ChatGPT with developer-written drone code as training data, we fine-tune the CodeT5 to achieve automated translation from natural language to executable code for drone tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior task execution efficiency and command understanding capabilities in simulated environments. In the future, we plan to extend the model functionality in a modular manner, enhancing its adaptability to complex scenarios and driving the application of drone technologies in real-world environments.