LatBridge: Efficient and Stable Model Replacement in Latent-Communication Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Multi-agent systems rely on communication to complete tasks, and latent communication passes continuous representations to reduce text generation and re-encoding. However, multi-agent systems must reconfigure agent models, whereas existing latent-communication methods are built for fixed model combinations, so their interfaces may fail after replacement. Our pilot study confirms this interface failure and identifies the requirement for interface reuse after model replacement. We present LatBridge, which connects agent models through a shared Bridge and separate interfaces under a shared latent-communication protocol. After agent model replacement, LatBridge reuses unchanged interfaces, selects matching low-rank interfaces, and combines them through the Bridge, training only missing ones with all models frozen. The Bridge processes source representations in the basic mode and constructs target input without autoregressive generation in the accelerated mode. Experiments support effective communication after model replacement, with mean basic-mode accuracies of 14.8% on MATH and 27.3% on ALFWorld next-action prediction across eight small-model configurations. Analyses examine the factors supporting task accuracy and communication efficiency.