Pith. sign in

REVIEW 10 cited by

NetSafe: Exploring the Topological Safety of Multi-agent Networks

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2410.15686 v1 pith:5JNUNEGT submitted 2024-10-21 cs.MA cs.AI

NetSafe: Exploring the Topological Safety of Multi-agent Networks

classification cs.MA cs.AI
keywords networkssafetymulti-agenttopologicalresearchagentattacksinformation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have empowered nodes within multi-agent networks with intelligence, showing growing applications in both academia and industry. However, how to prevent these networks from generating malicious information remains unexplored with previous research on single LLM's safety be challenging to transfer. In this paper, we focus on the safety of multi-agent networks from a topological perspective, investigating which topological properties contribute to safer networks. To this end, we propose a general framework, NetSafe along with an iterative RelCom interaction to unify existing diverse LLM-based agent frameworks, laying the foundation for generalized topological safety research. We identify several critical phenomena when multi-agent networks are exposed to attacks involving misinformation, bias, and harmful information, termed as Agent Hallucination and Aggregation Safety. Furthermore, we find that highly connected networks are more susceptible to the spread of adversarial attacks, with task performance in a Star Graph Topology decreasing by 29.7%. Besides, our proposed static metrics aligned more closely with real-world dynamic evaluations than traditional graph-theoretic metrics, indicating that networks with greater average distances from attackers exhibit enhanced safety. In conclusion, our work introduces a new topological perspective on the safety of LLM-based multi-agent networks and discovers several unreported phenomena, paving the way for future research to explore the safety of such networks.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Copyright Protection for Large Language Models: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Trends

    cs.CR 2025-08 accept novelty 7.0

    A survey of LLM copyright protection that unifies text watermarking, model watermarking, and model fingerprinting while presenting new coverage of fingerprint transfer and removal.

  2. When Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Activation-space divergence detects and corrects compromised LLM agents in multi-agent systems without interaction graphs or synchronized rounds, outperforming graph baselines especially under async stealthy attacks.

  3. MESA: Prioritizing Vulnerable Communication Channels for Securing Multi-Agent Systems

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MESA ranks MAS communication edges by vulnerability via graph-theoretic metrics and dynamic probes, achieving mean Spearman ρ=+0.60 correlation with empirical per-edge attack success and 3x interception gain when moni...

  4. Defending LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems Against Cooperative Attacks with Sentence-Level Rectification

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    STAR defense mitigates cooperative attacks in LLM-based multi-agent systems, improving task success rate by 36.76% on average while cooperative attacks cause a 5.34% relative drop compared to independent attacks.

  5. When Child Inherits: Modeling and Exploiting Subagent Spawn in Multi-Agent Networks

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Multi-agent LLM frameworks can spread compromises across agent boundaries via insecure memory inheritance during subagent spawning.

  6. BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks

    cs.AI 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BlindGuard introduces an unsupervised hierarchical agent encoder plus corruption-guided contrastive detector that identifies malicious agents in LLM-based multi-agent systems without any attack labels or prior knowled...

  7. To trust or not to trust: Attention-based Trust Management for LLM Multi-Agent Systems

    cs.CR 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Introduces six-dimension trustworthiness definition and attention-based A-Trust score with a TMS to improve LLM-MAS robustness against malicious or unreliable messages.

  8. A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems

    cs.AI 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A comprehensive review of self-evolving AI agents that improve themselves over time, organized via a framework of inputs, agent system, environment, and optimizers, with domain-specific and safety discussions.

  9. Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A synthesis of 247 papers on LLM agent security identifies prompt injection and tool hijacking as dominant threats, notes weakly compositional defenses, and argues for trust boundaries and realistic evaluations.

  10. Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges

    cs.CL 2025-03 accept novelty 3.0

    A survey that deconstructs LLM agent systems via a methodology-centered taxonomy linking design principles to emergent behaviors, applications, and challenges.