Beyond Message Passing: A Semantic View of Agent Communication Protocols
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
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| _version_ | 1866917402811301888 |
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| author | Yuan, Dun Lyu, Fuyuan Yuan, Ye Zhang, Weixu He, Bowei Geng, Jiayi Du, Linfeng Sun, Zipeng Chen, Yankai Han, Changjiang Kang, Jikun Chen, Xi Wu, Haolun Liu, Xue |
| author_facet | Yuan, Dun Lyu, Fuyuan Yuan, Ye Zhang, Weixu He, Bowei Geng, Jiayi Du, Linfeng Sun, Zipeng Chen, Yankai Han, Changjiang Kang, Jikun Chen, Xi Wu, Haolun Liu, Xue |
| contents | Agent communication protocols are becoming critical infrastructure for large language model (LLM) systems that must use tools, coordinate with other agents, and operate across heterogeneous environments. This work presents a human-inspired perspective on this emerging landscape by organizing agent communication into three layers: communication, syntactic, and semantic. Under this framework, we systematically analyze 18 representative protocols and compare how they support reliable transport, structured interaction, and meaning-level coordination. Our analysis shows a clear imbalance in current protocol design. Most protocols provide increasingly mature support for transport, streaming, schema definition, and lifecycle management, but offer limited protocol-level mechanisms for clarification, context alignment, and verification. As a result, semantic responsibilities are often pushed into prompts, wrappers, or application-specific orchestration logic, creating hidden interoperability and maintenance costs. To make this gap actionable, we further identify major forms of technical debt in today's protocol ecosystem and distill practical guidance for selecting protocols under different deployment settings. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for interoperable, secure, and semantically robust agent ecosystems that move beyond message passing toward shared understanding. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_02369 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Beyond Message Passing: A Semantic View of Agent Communication Protocols Yuan, Dun Lyu, Fuyuan Yuan, Ye Zhang, Weixu He, Bowei Geng, Jiayi Du, Linfeng Sun, Zipeng Chen, Yankai Han, Changjiang Kang, Jikun Chen, Xi Wu, Haolun Liu, Xue Networking and Internet Architecture Artificial Intelligence Agent communication protocols are becoming critical infrastructure for large language model (LLM) systems that must use tools, coordinate with other agents, and operate across heterogeneous environments. This work presents a human-inspired perspective on this emerging landscape by organizing agent communication into three layers: communication, syntactic, and semantic. Under this framework, we systematically analyze 18 representative protocols and compare how they support reliable transport, structured interaction, and meaning-level coordination. Our analysis shows a clear imbalance in current protocol design. Most protocols provide increasingly mature support for transport, streaming, schema definition, and lifecycle management, but offer limited protocol-level mechanisms for clarification, context alignment, and verification. As a result, semantic responsibilities are often pushed into prompts, wrappers, or application-specific orchestration logic, creating hidden interoperability and maintenance costs. To make this gap actionable, we further identify major forms of technical debt in today's protocol ecosystem and distill practical guidance for selecting protocols under different deployment settings. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for interoperable, secure, and semantically robust agent ecosystems that move beyond message passing toward shared understanding. |
| title | Beyond Message Passing: A Semantic View of Agent Communication Protocols |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02369 |