SentinelNet: Safeguarding Multi-Agent Collaboration Through Credit-Based Dynamic Threat Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Feng, Yang, Pan, Xudong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Feng, Yang
Pan, Xudong
author_facet Feng, Yang
Pan, Xudong
contents Malicious agents pose significant threats to the reliability and decision-making capabilities of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing defenses often fall short due to reactive designs or centralized architectures which may introduce single points of failure. To address these challenges, we propose SentinelNet, the first decentralized framework for proactively detecting and mitigating malicious behaviors in multi-agent collaboration. SentinelNet equips each agent with a credit-based detector trained via contrastive learning on augmented adversarial debate trajectories, enabling autonomous evaluation of message credibility and dynamic neighbor ranking via bottom-k elimination to suppress malicious communications. To overcome the scarcity of attack data, it generates adversarial trajectories simulating diverse threats, ensuring robust training. Experiments on MAS benchmarks show SentinelNet achieves near-perfect detection of malicious agents, close to 100% within two debate rounds, and recovers 95% of system accuracy from compromised baselines. By exhibiting strong generalizability across domains and attack patterns, SentinelNet establishes a novel paradigm for safeguarding collaborative MAS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16219
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SentinelNet: Safeguarding Multi-Agent Collaboration Through Credit-Based Dynamic Threat Detection
Feng, Yang
Pan, Xudong
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Malicious agents pose significant threats to the reliability and decision-making capabilities of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing defenses often fall short due to reactive designs or centralized architectures which may introduce single points of failure. To address these challenges, we propose SentinelNet, the first decentralized framework for proactively detecting and mitigating malicious behaviors in multi-agent collaboration. SentinelNet equips each agent with a credit-based detector trained via contrastive learning on augmented adversarial debate trajectories, enabling autonomous evaluation of message credibility and dynamic neighbor ranking via bottom-k elimination to suppress malicious communications. To overcome the scarcity of attack data, it generates adversarial trajectories simulating diverse threats, ensuring robust training. Experiments on MAS benchmarks show SentinelNet achieves near-perfect detection of malicious agents, close to 100% within two debate rounds, and recovers 95% of system accuracy from compromised baselines. By exhibiting strong generalizability across domains and attack patterns, SentinelNet establishes a novel paradigm for safeguarding collaborative MAS.
title SentinelNet: Safeguarding Multi-Agent Collaboration Through Credit-Based Dynamic Threat Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16219