AI & ML Paradigm Shift

Reason-to-Transmit introduces deliberative communication for multi-agent systems, where agents reason about *why* a message benefits the receiver rather than just broadcasting features.

March 24, 2026

Original Paper

Reason-to-Transmit: Deliberative Adaptive Communication for Cooperative Perception

Aayam Bansal, Ishaan Gangwani

arXiv · 2603.20308

The Takeaway

It moves multi-agent communication from reactive 'confidence gating' to an active reasoning process over information gaps and bandwidth budgets. This approach approaches oracle performance in high-occlusion scenarios where standard selective communication fails.

From the abstract

Cooperative perception among autonomous agents overcomes the limitations of single-agent sensing, but bandwidth constraints in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks require efficient communication policies. Existing approaches rely on reactive mechanisms, such as confidence maps, learned gating, or sparse masks, to decide what to transmit, without reasoning about why a message benefits the receiver. We introduce Reason-to-Transmit (R2T), a framework that equips each agent with a lightweight trans