PeerGuard: Defending Multi-Agent Systems Against Backdoor Attacks Through Mutual Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fan, Falong, Li, Xi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fan, Falong
Li, Xi
author_facet Fan, Falong
Li, Xi
contents Multi-agent systems leverage advanced AI models as autonomous agents that interact, cooperate, or compete to complete complex tasks across applications such as robotics and traffic management. Despite their growing importance, safety in multi-agent systems remains largely underexplored, with most research focusing on single AI models rather than interacting agents. This work investigates backdoor vulnerabilities in multi-agent systems and proposes a defense mechanism based on agent interactions. By leveraging reasoning abilities, each agent evaluates responses from others to detect illogical reasoning processes, which indicate poisoned agents. Experiments on LLM-based multi-agent systems, including ChatGPT series and Llama 3, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving high accuracy in identifying poisoned agents while minimizing false positives on clean agents. We believe this work provides insights into multi-agent system safety and contributes to the development of robust, trustworthy AI interactions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PeerGuard: Defending Multi-Agent Systems Against Backdoor Attacks Through Mutual Reasoning
Fan, Falong
Li, Xi
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multi-agent systems leverage advanced AI models as autonomous agents that interact, cooperate, or compete to complete complex tasks across applications such as robotics and traffic management. Despite their growing importance, safety in multi-agent systems remains largely underexplored, with most research focusing on single AI models rather than interacting agents. This work investigates backdoor vulnerabilities in multi-agent systems and proposes a defense mechanism based on agent interactions. By leveraging reasoning abilities, each agent evaluates responses from others to detect illogical reasoning processes, which indicate poisoned agents. Experiments on LLM-based multi-agent systems, including ChatGPT series and Llama 3, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving high accuracy in identifying poisoned agents while minimizing false positives on clean agents. We believe this work provides insights into multi-agent system safety and contributes to the development of robust, trustworthy AI interactions.
title PeerGuard: Defending Multi-Agent Systems Against Backdoor Attacks Through Mutual Reasoning
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11642