arXiv Computation and Language

Share the Symbol, Not the Vector: Training-Free Fact Communication Across Language Models

arXiv AI
Sep 18

For Your Eyes Only: Evaluating Coordination Between Isolated Language Model Instances

For Your Eyes Only: Evaluating Coordination Between Isolated Language Model Instances explores whether a language model can embed a signal in natural language that another independent instance can detect without shared memory or coordination training. The study introduces a cooperative signalling game where a Sender describes two words, one hidden, and a Receiver must identify the target. Seven contemporary models from four architectural families were tested on 300 word pairs, revealing that most struggle to coordinate when signals must be undetectable, though one frontier model performs near-perfectly even after filtering, and that models can also use this capability for deliberate misdirection.

By Alexander Shirnin, Aleksey Kudelya
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Dual-Cache Latent Space Communication between Heterogeneous Language Models

The paper introduces XKV, a latent protocol that enables efficient communication between heterogeneous language models by translating a sharer's key‑value cache into a receiver's context. XKV overcomes limitations of prior methods by jointly pooling both caches, reconciling differing layer depths, and allowing each receiver position to retrieve its own residual in native KV geometry. Across 45 dataset‑model pairings, XKV outperforms previous protocols and text communication while using fewer parameters and achieving faster translation times.

By Jiyao Liu, Qi Zhang, Yaoyi Jia, Ziwen Kan, Song Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

ToM2Vec: Continuous Theory-of-Mind Tokens for Multi-Agent Coordination

ToM2Vec introduces continuous theory-of-mind tokens that enable large language model agents to reason about multiple possible partner states in multi‑agent settings. By training these tokens to abstract partner thoughts, the model generates latent representations that condition agents’ thoughts and actions, improving performance across collaborative, competitive, and mixed‑motive environments. The approach demonstrates that latent reasoning outperforms text‑based reasoning and generalizes to unseen partner models, with tokens encoding partner beliefs, desires, and next actions.

By Nithin Sivakumaran, Ali Payani, Hyunji Lee, Mohit Bansal, Elias Stengel-Eskin
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Knowing Before Answering: Decoding Language Models for Reliable RAG

The paper introduces a method for determining whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have sufficient, insufficient, or conflicting evidence to answer a question. By training a lightweight linear classifier on hidden activations and attention-derived features from 16 language models, the authors demonstrate that these internal signals reliably predict the adequacy of retrieved documents, outperforming prompting-based baselines and specialized RAG models. Analysis shows that middle-layer hidden states carry the most informative signals for this triage task.

By Syed Mahbubul Huq, Christopher Child, Tillman Weyde, Pranava Madhyastha
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2511. 20639v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence.

By Jiaru Zou, Ruizhong Qiu, Gaotang Li, Xiyuan Yang, Katherine Tieu, Pan Lu, Ke Shen, Hanghang Tong, Yejin Choi, Jingrui He, James Zou, Mengdi Wang, Ling Yang