# Think Before You Speak: Enabling Training-Free Latent Communication Between Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16165 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16165/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 10 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Test-time compute and efficient thinking](https://mlsanity.com/lr/test-time-compute-and-efficient-thinking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [CacheBlend: Fast Large Language Model Serving for RAG with Cached Knowledge Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16444/) (2024)
- [Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03215/) (2025)
- [KVCOMM: Online Cross-context KV-cache Communication for Efficient LLM-based Multi-agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12872/) (2025)
- [DroidSpeak: KV Cache Sharing for Cross-LLM Communication and Multi-LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02820/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Memory from a Computer Architecture Perspective: Visions and Challenges Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10062/) (2026)
- [RelayCaching: Accelerating LLM Collaboration via Decoding KV Cache Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13289/) (2026)
- [Latent Cache Flow: Model-to-Model Communication Without Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22863/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks in coding, mathematical logic, and iterative reasoning, especially by coordinating effectively within multi-agent systems (MAS). However, language agents traditionally communicate via text exchange, which introduces a bottleneck in information transfer and adds prefill latency for downstream agents. Recent work proposes that directly sharing the key-value (KV) cache between language models can enable efficient latent collaboration, entirely bypassing standard text-based communication. To enable latent communication between heterogeneous models of different sizes, prior work introduces trained fusion adapters for each model pair, which limits practical deployment. We introduce CacheFuse, a training-free method which demonstrates that augmenting a downstream model with an upstream model's KV cache using linear interpolation consistently enables superior performance than the standalone downstream model can achieve. We systematically analyze CacheFuse across four reasoning and knowledge benchmarks and demonstrate up to 8.6 percentage points higher accuracy compared to single-model baselines and up to 12.2x TTFT speedup compared to text-based communication in multi-model inference.
