Agent Communications — Paper Vault

A zetl vault of summaries of every paper in this repository.

Conventions

One markdown file per paper. Filenames are slugified titles (e.g. KQML-Overview.md).
Each note contains:
- # Title heading
- Reference (authors, year, venue/source file)
- Summary — 1–3 paragraphs of core ideas
- Key ideas — bullet list
- Connections — [[wikilinks]] to related notes or concept pages
Concept notes (e.g. [[KQML]], [[FIPA-ACL]], [[Gossip Protocols]]) act as hubs.
index is the Map of Content (MOC) grouping every note by theme.

Layout

index — Map of Content, every paper grouped by theme
concept-map — the conceptual tour: the ideas and how they interlock
Per-paper notes contain summary + key ideas + connections + ## Conceptual Contribution (claim / mechanism / concepts / stance / relates-to)
Concept hubs (e.g. KQML, LangSec, Commitment-based Semantics, BDI) act as junctions
Fine-grained technical terms are wikilinked without dedicated pages (“wanted pages”) so that future notes can backfill definitions — expected zetl pattern, not a defect

Commands

zetl list         # list notes
zetl check        # validate links
zetl stats        # graph stats
zetl serve        # browse

Backlinks

Linked Pages

BDI

Belief-Desire-Intention

Dominant agent-architecture paradigm: agents maintain beliefs, desires, and intentions and deliberate over them.

In this vault

Commitment-based Semantics

Approach that grounds ACL message meaning in public social commitments rather than private mental states — making conformance verifiable.

In this vault

ACL Rethinking Principles
Agent Communication Languages - Rethinking the Principles
Agent Communication And Institutional Reality
A Common Ontology Of ACLs
Public Semantics
Mentalistic Semantics
Flexible Protocol Specification and Execution
A Commitment-Based Approach to Agent Communication
CBCL - Safe Self-Extending Agent Communication — modern LangSec-grounded ACL inheriting Singh’s social-agency programme; dialect installation as public commitment

LangSec

Language-theoretic Security

Research programme treating input-handling bugs as recognition-theoretic failures: minimise input-language power and build validating recognisers.

In this vault

Guns and Butter - Towards Formal Axioms of Input Validation — Hansen & Patterson 2005; the seminal LangSec paper
The Halting Problems of Network Stack Insecurity
Seven Turrets Of Babel
PKI Layer Cake - Kaminsky Patterson Sassaman
Parser Differential
Distributed Security
Security Applications Of Formal Language Theory
Exploit Programming - From Buffer Overflows To Weird Machines
CBCL - Safe Self-Extending Agent Communication — first ACL designed from LangSec principles
Deterministic Context-Free Language
Parser Differential Attack

KQML

Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language — one of the first ACLs, developed in the early 1990s by the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort. Performative-based, separating content language from communication.

Primary sources

Agent Communication Languages
FIPA-ACL — the standardised successor
Speech Act Theory
Ontolingua Portable Ontology Specifications — companion Knowledge Sharing Effort project
A Common Ontology Of ACLs
Verifiable Semantics for ACLs
CBCL - Safe Self-Extending Agent Communication — modern DCFL-bounded ACL with the same performative/extensibility ambitions but formal safety guarantees

concept-map

Conceptual Map

A guided conceptual tour through the vault. Where index lists the papers, this page lists the ideas and shows how they interlock. Every paper note now also carries a ## Conceptual Contribution section (claim / mechanism / concepts / stance / relates-to).

1. The Central Tension: What Does a Message Mean?

Agent communication’s perennial question — whose mental states does a message commit? — runs the length of this vault.

Speech Act Theory (Austin → Searle → Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic) fixes a vocabulary: illocutionary force, direction of fit, sincerity and preparatory conditions. Every ACL after this inherits it.
Mentalistic Semantics — grounding message meaning in the beliefs/intentions of sender and receiver. KQML (KQML Overview, KQML Language And Protocol, KQML as an Agent Communication Language) and FIPA-ACL adopt it.
Commitment-based Semantics / Public Semantics — the counter-move. Singh’s critique (ACL Rethinking Principles, Agent Communication Languages - Rethinking the Principles) argues mentalistic semantics is unverifiable: we cannot inspect another agent’s mind, only its public commitments. Agent Communication And Institutional Reality pushes further: every message is a declaration that alters social commitments; Searle’s “counts-as” is the operative logic.
Verifiable Semantics — Verifiable Semantics for ACLs formalises the critique by requiring grounding in program state so conformance is model-checkable. A Common Ontology Of ACLs offers a reconciliation: role-instanced public attitudes unify the two families.
Conversation Policy / Interaction Protocols — even with messages nailed down, coordination needs conversations. Coordinating Agents Using ACL Conversations (Colored Petri Nets), ACRE Agent Conversation Reasoning Engine (Dooley graphs), and An Interaction-oriented Agent Framework for Open Environments (commitment-based protocols) make the conversation first-class. BSPL (BSPL - The Blindingly Simple Protocol Language) is the information-driven counter-tradition: no message ordering at all, with causality and exclusion derived from ⌜in⌝/⌜out⌝ parameter adornments and keys (Information Protocols), Enactability, safety and liveness verified declaratively (Semantics and Verification of Information-Based Protocols), and agents programmed as decision makers over enabled forms (Kiko - Programming Agents to Enact Interaction Protocols).

Surveys mapping this debate: The State of the Art in Agent Communication Languages, Trends in Agent Communication Language.

2. The Language Stack

Messages compose into languages compose into protocols.

Layer	Concept	Representative papers
Content	KIF, ontology term sets	KQML Overview, Ontolingua Portable Ontology Specifications, Handbook On Ontologies
Message	Performatives / illocutions	KQML, FIPA-ACL, Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic
Conversation	Interaction Protocols	Coordinating Agents Using ACL Conversations, ACRE Agent Conversation Reasoning Engine, BSPL - The Blindingly Simple Protocol Language
Transport	Facilitators, routing	KQML Language And Protocol, Model Context Protocol, Agent-to-Agent Protocol

This same stack — content / message / conversation / transport — reappears in the modern LLM-agent protocol wave: see Survey Of AI Agent Protocols and Survey Of Agent Interoperability Protocols, which place Model Context Protocol (tools), ACP, Agent-to-Agent Protocol, and Agent Network Protocol at progressively higher layers.

3. How Does Shared Language Arise?

A separate tradition asks where meaning comes from rather than what it contains.

Linguistic foundations. Three Models for the Description of Language establishes what structure a shared code must have (Chomsky hierarchy, transformational grammar). Algorithmic Information Theory - Grunwald Vitanyi provides the information-theoretic counterpart: meaning is compressed description.
Language Games. Language Games for Autonomous Robots (Steels) shows grounded lexicons self-assemble through situated interaction — no designer required. The same bootstrap appears decision-theoretically in Towards Automating the Evolution of Linguistic Competence and Toward Automated Evolution of ACLs: rational agents negotiate vocabulary when current language fails.
Emergent Communication. The deep-learning revival: Multi-Agent Cooperation and the Emergence of Natural Language, Emergence of Grounded Compositional Language in Multi-Agent Populations — neural agents in referential/signalling games evolve compositional codes. On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication is the sharpest critique: most metrics fail to distinguish real communication from confounds; measure positive signalling and positive listening with causal interventions.
Common Business Communication Language is an analogue in the pre-ML era — an open-ended language negotiable between organisations with graceful partial-understanding fallback.
The LLM inflection point. Why AI Agents Communicate In Human Language argues natural language is exactly the wrong inter-agent medium: lossy, non-differentiable, ambiguous. The thread rejoins the ACL debate a quarter-century later.

index

Agent Communications Vault

A curated, wikilink-connected reading vault on agent communication languages, multi-agent systems, capability security, distributed systems, and LLM agents — from McCarthy and Minsky through KQML/FIPA to modern LLM agent protocols.

Each note summarises a paper in its own words (summary, key ideas, conceptual contribution, connections) and is cross-linked to related concepts and papers, forming a navigable graph of the field.

Start with concept-map for a guided tour, or browse the map of content below.

How to contribute

The vault is a plain-text zetl wikilink graph — every note is a markdown file with [[wikilinks]]. Contributions welcome:

Clone: git clone https://github.com/anuna-cooperative/agent-comms-wiki.git
Add or edit notes as plain markdown. New paper notes should follow the structure of existing ones (Reference, Summary, Key Ideas, Connections, Conceptual Contribution, Tags).
Run zetl check to validate links, and zetl build to preview the site locally.
Open a pull request at https://github.com/anuna-cooperative/agent-comms-wiki.

See README for detailed conventions.