用激活值检测多智能体系统中的隐蔽攻击,不依赖图结构且抗异步干扰。
When Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems

- 通过分析智能体内部激活状态,实现无需交互图的鲁棒检测
- 异步场景下F1提升0.55(达0.93),远超基线(0.38)
- 可修复被攻陷智能体,而非简单隔离,适合高安全需求场景
基于大语言模型的多智能体系统(MAS)在协作完成复杂任务时面临严重的安全挑战,源于智能体及交互层面的漏洞。现有防御方法通常依赖两个假设:攻击行为语义明显,以及对系统拓扑和智能体交互进行显式图建模。然而现实中攻击日益语义隐蔽,而系统执行常为异步,与图模型所假设的时间对齐不符。为此,我们提出AcMAS,一种基于激活值的恶意行为检测框架。通过分析本地智能体在激活空间中的内在推理状态,AcMAS以同步性鲁棒的方式检测隐蔽攻击,无需依赖显式交互图。此外,激活分析提供的关键信号可指导系统恢复受损智能体功能,而非采用主流方法中的破坏性隔离。全面评估表明,AcMAS在对抗隐蔽攻击方面显著优于图基基线:同步场景下F1提升0.22(0.94 vs. 0.72),异步场景下提升0.55(0.93 vs. 0.38),且在多种开源LLM骨干、攻击强度与系统规模下具备泛化能力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While enabling effective collaboration on complex tasks, LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) face critical security challenges due to vulnerabilities at the agent and interaction levels. Most existing MAS security defenses are built upon two core assumptions: semantically-explicit malicious attacks and explicit graph-based modeling of the MAS topology and agent-level interactions. In practice, real-world attacks are becoming more semantically stealthy, while MAS execution is typically asynchronous without the temporal alignment assumed by graph-based propagation models. To address these limitations, we propose AcMAS, an activation-based framework for malicious-behavior detection in MAS. By analyzing internal reasoning states in the activation space of local agents, AcMAS detects even stealthy attacks in a synchronization-robust fashion, without relying on explicit interaction graphs. Moreover, our activation analysis provides critical signals to guide AcMAS in restoring the functionality of compromised agents, rather than the disruptive agent isolation commonly used by the state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that AcMAS significantly outperforms graph-based baselines against stealthy attacks, by +0.22 F1 in synchronous settings (0.94 vs. 0.72) and by +0.55 F1 in asynchronous settings (0.93 vs. 0.38), with generalization across diverse open-source LLM backbones, attack intensity, and MAS scale.
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