Rana Shahroz
Author directoryAlso published as: Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan
2026
The Adaptive Interrogator: Detecting Trojan LLMs in Multi-Agent Systems via Evolved Conversational Strategies
Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan | Ruichen Zhang | Zhen Tan | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan | Ruichen Zhang | Zhen Tan | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
While Large Language Model (LLM) safety has focused on single-agent, white-box settings, the adoption of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) creates a critical blind spot: supply chain vulnerabilities in MAS ecosystems. These systems often rely on third-party agents accessed via black-box APIs, creating risks where attackers can embed hidden triggers to manipulate collective reasoning or outputs. Because internal weights are inaccessible, traditional white-box defenses fail to detect these threats. Consequently, a critical gap exists in auditing these systems for ”Trojan” agents, i.e., malicious models that behave normally until triggered by specific, often multi-turn, conversational contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Conversational Trojan Unmasking System (CTUS), a black-box auditing framework that leverages an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to autonomously expose hidden threats. Drawing on social deduction mechanics, CTUS deploys a ”Judge” agent to evolve conversational probes that provoke Trojan agents into revealing their malicious nature without alerting benign peers. We validate CTUS across diverse architectures (Llama-2/3, Gemma, Mistral) and attack vectors (word, syntax, semantic, RLHF). Our results demonstrate that CTUS achieves superior detection rates (up to 100% in specific configurations). Furthermore, we conduct rigorous analyses to confirm the framework’s robustness, exhibiting negligible false positives on benign systems and stability across system configurations, establishing CTUS as a scalable safeguard for the multi-agent landscape.
2025
ORAL: Prompting Your Large-Scale LoRAs via Conditional Recurrent Diffusion
Rana Shahroz | Dongwen Tang | Pingzhi Li | Kai Wang | Tianlong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Rana Shahroz | Dongwen Tang | Pingzhi Li | Kai Wang | Tianlong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Parameter generation has emerged as a novel paradigm for neural network development, offering an alternative to traditional neural network training by synthesizing high-quality model weights directly. In the context of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for evolving (i.e, constantly updated) large language models (LLMs), this approach promises efficient adaptation without costly retraining. However, existing methods face critical limitations in simultaneously achieving scalability and controllability. In this paper, we introduce ORAL, a novel conditional recurrent diffusion framework that addresses these challenges. ORAL incorporates a novel conditioning mechanism that integrates model architecture and textual task specifications, enabling the generation of task-specific LoRA parameters that can seamlessly transfer across evolving foundation models. Our approach successfully scales to billions-of-parameter LLMs and maintains controllability. Through extensive experiments across seven language tasks, four vision tasks, and three multimodal tasks using five pre-trained LLMs, we demonstrate that ORAL generates high-quality LoRA parameters that achieve comparable or superior performance to vanilla trained counterparts.
Agents Under Siege: Breaking Pragmatic Multi-Agent LLM Systems with Optimized Prompt Attacks
Rana Shahroz | Zhen Tan | Sukwon Yun | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Rana Shahroz | Zhen Tan | Sukwon Yun | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Most discussions about Large Language Model (LLM) safety have focused on single-agent settings but multi-agent LLM systems now create novel adversarial risks because their behavior depends on communication between agents and decentralized reasoning. In this work, we innovatively focus on attacking pragmatic systems that have constrains such as limited token bandwidth, latency between message delivery, and defense mechanisms. We design a permutation-invariant adversarial attack that optimizes prompt distribution across latency and bandwidth-constraint network topologies to bypass distributed safety mechanisms within the system. Formulating the attack path as a problem of maximum-flow minimum-cost, coupled with the novel Permutation-Invariant Evasion Loss (PIEL), we leverage graph-based optimization to maximize attack success rate while minimizing detection risk. Evaluating across models including Llama, Mistral, Gemma, DeepSeek and other variants on various datasets like JailBreakBench and AdversarialBench, our method outperforms conventional attacks by up to 7×, exposing critical vulnerabilities in multi-agent systems. Moreover, we demonstrate that existing defenses, including variants of Llama-Guard and PromptGuard, fail to prohibit our attack, emphasizing the urgent need for multi-agent specific safety mechanisms.