When Does Latent Communication Pay? A Causal Audit of Relayed KV Caches in Multi-Agent LLMs

Multi-agent LLM systems relay key--value caches instead of text and credit their gains to exchanged ``latent thoughts''. That credit is a claim about \emph{which} example's cache is relayed, not merely that one is. We audit it causally in released systems. The cache is replaced with deranged (mismatched-example), zeroed, and moment-matched random counterparts, under two regimes defined by whether the receiver needs the sender's private information. Where it does, the battery reads ceiling: 100\%

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ethics.ai (5 August 2026), “When Does Latent Communication Pay? A Causal Audit of Relayed KV Caches in Multi-Agent LLMs,” evidence record 16930, https://ethics.ai/record/16930 (originally published by arXiv cs.AI).

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