Jiayan Sun
Author directory2026
TopoSHIELD: Reshaping the Flow of Malice via Spatio-Temporal Risk-Aware Topological Evolution in Multi-Agent Systems
Ruiyang Huang | Chenxi Wang | Tinghe Zhang | Fengrui Liu | Jiayan Sun | Haocheng Wang | Yifan Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Ruiyang Huang | Chenxi Wang | Tinghe Zhang | Fengrui Liu | Jiayan Sun | Haocheng Wang | Yifan Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
While LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) demonstrate remarkable problem-solving capabilities, their interconnectivity acts as a conduit for the rapid spread of malicious injections. Addressing the limitations of static defenses, we present TopoSHIELD, a framework that reshapes the flow of malice via risk-aware topological evolution. Our approach utilizes a spatio-temporal graph neural network to monitor interaction dynamics, calculating node risk entropy (NRE) and edge attack conductivity (EAC) to pinpoint vulnerabilities. Guided by these metrics, TopoSHIELD executes precise structural interventions, pruning high-risk edges and isolating compromised communities to block attack diffusion. Empirically, TopoSHIELD reduces toxicity by 58% on GPT-4o while preserving high utility (>90% success rate), outperforming existing baselines in both suppression efficiency and scalability.
Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind: Unveiling Latent Attack in Latent-based Multi-Agent Systems
Chenxi Wang | Ruiyang Huang | Jiayan Sun | Lei Wei | Yifan Wu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenxi Wang | Ruiyang Huang | Jiayan Sun | Lei Wei | Yifan Wu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Latent-based multi-agent systems replace parts of explicit inter-agent communication with hidden representations, offering a new direction for efficient and flexible agent collaboration. However, moving coordination into latent space may also move attacks beyond the reach of visible-text inspection. In this paper, we study whether latent states can carry attack-associated information that remains effective during clean executions. To examine this question, we introduce a latent attack framework that reactivates attack-induced effects through latent interventions without reusing adversarial text. Extensive experiments show that the resulting latent attacks can substantially degrade task performance in clean executions, especially when applied to inter-agent KV-cache handoffs rather than local hidden states. Further control analyses indicate that this degradation cannot be reduced to arbitrary perturbations or invalid generation. Overall, our findings suggest that latent-based collaboration does not remove attack risk; it shifts part of the risk into less observable execution states, calling for safeguards beyond visible-text inspection.