Jinhang Zuo
Author directory2026
WEREWOLF: Reputation-Aware Red-Teaming for Self-Organizing LLM Multi-Agent Systems
Manhin Poon | Qirun Zeng | Xiangxiang Dai | Jinhang Zuo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Manhin Poon | Qirun Zeng | Xiangxiang Dai | Jinhang Zuo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Self-organizing LLM-based multi-agent systems dynamically select agents and organize communication graphs for each query. While this adaptivity improves flexibility, it also creates a control-plane attack surface: a malicious agent may exploit this selection and organization process to preserve future access and influence over later tasks. We formulate the attacker as a reputation-aware Trojan agent that chooses when to behave constructively and when to disrupt the task. Under full reputation access, we prove the optimality of a threshold-based attack policy and show why persistent attacks require a survivability constraint. We then propose WEREWOLF, a primal-dual reinforcement learning attacker that learns attack timing under hidden reputation by maximizing task disruption subject to control-plane access loss. Across four self-organizing systems and three benchmarks, it reduces average accuracy from 72.3% to 25.8% with an 86.3% attack success rate, and retains control-plane exposure comparable to that of honest agents.