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Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
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Blindsight Transport: Lossless Hidden State Communication Between Language Model Agents

Authors: Pittinger, Thomas;

Blindsight Transport: Lossless Hidden State Communication Between Language Model Agents

Abstract

Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) predominantly communicatethrough natural language text. We demonstrate that this text-based communication acts asa severe information bottleneck, analogous to the children’s game of Chinese Whispers, whereeach retransmission introduces compounding distortion. We propose Blindsight Transport, amethod that replaces text-based inter-agent communication with direct hidden state transferthrough the transformer’s residual stream. By splitting a transformer into an early-layercourier agent (layers 0–1) and a late-layer receiver agent (layers 2–N), information flows asraw activations rather than generated text. We prove that this yields KL divergence of exactlyzero from baseline—a lossless channel—whereas standard text-based handoff produces KLdivergences of 2.4–9.3 across all test conditions. We present seven experiments using GPT-2family models (82M–355M parameters): (1) a Chinese Whispers comparison showing 8/8test wins for hidden state transport, (2) multi-agent chains of 2–10 agents where text-basedcommunication causes immediate catastrophic signal destruction while hidden state transportmaintains KL = 0 regardless of chain length, (3) lossless serialization of hidden states to disk,(4) scaling verification across model sizes, (5) cross-model transfer between architecturallydistinct models achieving 29–46× improvement over text, (6) cross-dimensional transfer vialearned linear projection achieving 75× improvement over text, and (7) qualitative analys

Keywords

multi-agent systems, hidden state transfer, transformer, blindsight

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
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