mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Latent Cache Flow: Model-to-Model Communication Without Text

arXiv 2605.22863 ↗First posted 19 May 2026cs.LGcited by 6

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

LLM agents today communicate via text, which incurs considerable latency and information loss due to the need to autoregressively decode the sharer model's state and encode at the receiver model. Recent work such as Cache-to-Cache (C2C; Fu et al., 2026) seeks to exchange KV caches by learning adapters that translate sharer KV matrices to the receiver model. However, the adapters are large and expensive to train, and translate individual tokens, which requires the target context to be identical. This is unsuitable for agent communication, where the LLMs have differing context. We introduce Latent Cache Flow (LCF). To address efficiency, we observe that keys and values can be jointly translated and compressed, reducing the adapter to about 4% of C2C's size. To address differing context, we design the adapter to transmit a summary of new information that the target model does not have. Our early experiments show that a pruned 13 MB LCF adapter can be more accurate than C2C at 956 MB in shared-context settings; for different contexts, LCF improves F1 by 7.5% and Exact Match by 23% while 8.5 times faster than text-based communication.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 10 of its 15 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

Builds on

10 of 15 references.

References · 10

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,710
  3. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  4. 2018Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answeringcited by 2,114
  5. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,739
  6. 2024DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Modelcited by 1,093
  7. 2023AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviorscited by 580
  8. 2025Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between Large Language Modelscited by 54
  9. 2025Transferring Linear Features Across Language Models With Model Stitchingcited by 17
  10. 2026Latent Space Communication via K-V Cache Alignmentcited by 9

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Prefill-Free Cross-Family KV Cache Transfer for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent LLMs
  2. 2025KVCOMM: Online Cross-context KV-cache Communication for Efficient LLM-based Multi-agent Systems
  3. 2026LCGuard: Latent Communication Guard for Safe KV Sharing in Multi-Agent Systems
  4. 2026RelayCaching: Accelerating LLM Collaboration via Decoding KV Cache Reuse
  5. 2026MemDecay: Region-Aware KV Cache Eviction for Efficient LLM Agent Inference
  6. 2026PolyKV: A Shared Asymmetrically-Compressed KV Cache Pool for Multi-Agent LLM Inference
  7. 2026Beyond tokens: a unified framework for latent communication in LLM-based multi-agent systems
  8. 2026KVCMAS: Efficient KV cache Correction for Shared Context in Multi-Agent Systems