Safety of Latent Communication in Multi-Agent Systems
Benign latent links between agents raise harmful compliance, and an RL attack lifts the mean score from 27.9 to 76.9.
The paper studies safety risks when multi-agent systems communicate through trainable links that map one agent's internal representations into another's input space. Even benign link training increased harmful compliance compared with text communication while the safety-aligned agents themselves were left unchanged. Optimizing links on harmful pairs, poisoning benign data, or using a reinforcement-learning attack that rewards harmful compliance together with normal task performance amplified the effect; across three topologies and four safety benchmarks, mean harmful compliance rose from 27.9 to 76.9. Redirecting rewards toward safer behavior repaired compromised links and cut harmful compliance without updating the agents.
- Trainable latent links can raise harmful compliance without changing the agents.
- Attackers may optimize links on harmful pairs or poison benign training data.
- An RL attack needs no harmful target responses and still rewards task utility.
- Mean harmful-compliance score rises from 27.9 to 76.9 across four benchmarks.
- Safer rewards repair compromised links without updating the underlying agents.
From the original article
1 min read at huggingface.co
Latent communication enables multi-agent systems to exchange information directly in internal representation space, reducing the token, computation, and latency overhead of text-based communication. To this end, lightweight trainable links are introduced to map the sender's representations into the receiver's input space.
By Muhammad Huzaifa, Sina Mavali, Thorsten Eisenhofer · huggingface.co
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