Lightweight AI for UAV-Mounted RIS: An Overview

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-mounted Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a promising architecture for enhancing wireless coverage, spectral efficiency, and energy performance in 6G networks. By combining programmable electromagnetic wave manipulation with aerial mobility, UAV-RIS systems enable dynamic blockage mitigation, adaptive beamforming, and flexible deployment across terrestrial, maritime, and satellite-integrated environments. However, joint optimization of UAV trajectory, RIS phase configuration, and resource allocation incurs high computational complexity, which is incompatible with the strict energy and onboard processing constraints of UAV platforms. Lightweight AI techniques offer practical solutions to this challenge. Hence, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of lightweight AI techniques for UAV-mounted RIS systems, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), meta-learning, Federated Learning (FL), Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), and energy-aware optimization. We present a detailed taxonomy and comparative analysis of existing work, highlight computational-energy trade-offs, and identify open research challenges for scalable, energy-efficient airborne intelligent surfaces. Furthermore, we present a case study demonstrating the effect of MAB schemes on throughput and energy efficiency in UAV-mounted RIS.