LatCom: Cross-Agent Latent Compression for Efficient Multi-Agent Collaboration
2609.37017

Authors

Shinan Zhang,Qihui Zhu,Dong Jin,Xiaobin Tan,Quan Zheng

Abstract

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) increasingly use latent collaboration to avoid the information loss and repeated encoding-decoding overhead of natural-language communication. However, directly forwarding all sender latents makes the receiver-side context scale with both the number of agents and the reasoning length, increasing computation, memory usage, and collaboration latency.

A natural solution is latent compression. But we find that cross-agent redundancy remains unresolved in existing latent compression approaches, which typically compress each sender independently and then concatenate the results.

We propose LatCom, a cross-agent latent compression framework for efficient multi-agent latent collaboration. LatCom maps multiple sender latents into a fixed number of receiver-readable and task-relevant slots.

Rather than reconstructing all sender hidden states, it optimizes the compressed latents for receiver-side task utility. LatCom trains the compressor in two stages: single-sender readability learning first establishes a latent interface interpretable by the frozen receiver, and multi-sender fusion learning then trains the compressor to fuse complementary evidence and remove redundancy across agents.

Experiments on multiple benchmarks with Qwen3-4B show that LatCom achieves an average 2.46x inference speed-up over LatentMAS and reduces output token usage by 70.3% while maintaining comparable average accuracy.

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