PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety

Zaibin Zhang, Yongting Zhang, Lijun Li, Jing Shao, Hongzhi Gao, Yu Qiao, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu, Feng Zhao


Abstract
Multi-agent systems, when enhanced with Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit profound capabilities in collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. To date, comprehensive research on the safety issues associated with multi-agent systems remains limited. In this paper, we explore these concerns through the innovative lens of agent psychology, revealing that the dark psychological states of agents constitute a significant threat to safety.To tackle these concerns, we propose a comprehensive framework (PsySafe) grounded in agent psychology, focusing on three key areas: firstly, identifying how dark personality traits in agents can lead to risky behaviors; secondly, evaluating the safety of multi-agent systems from the psychological and behavioral perspectives, and thirdly, devising effective strategies to mitigate these risks.Our experiments reveal several intriguing phenomena, such as the collective dangerous behaviors among agents, agents’ self-reflection when engaging in dangerous behavior, and the correlation between agents’ psychological assessments and dangerous behaviors. We anticipate that our framework and observations will provide valuable insights for further research into the safety of multi-agent systems. We make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI4Good24/PsySafe.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.812
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15202–15231
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.812
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zaibin Zhang, Yongting Zhang, Lijun Li, Jing Shao, Hongzhi Gao, Yu Qiao, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu, and Feng Zhao. 2024. PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15202–15231, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety (Zhang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.812.pdf