Xiangxiang Dai

Author directory

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.
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality. While revocable decoding strategies attempt to mitigate errors by verifying and remasking tokens, they typically operate within a mixed-quality context. This leads to two critical failures: Error Propagation, where new tokens absorb erroneous information from unreliable context, and Local Error Reinforcement, where errors mutually reinforce each other to evade detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose ASRD (Anchor Decoding), a training-free framework that operates within the embedding space. ASRD explicitly decouples the decoding context into trusted Anchor Tokens, which are identified via temporal consistency, and uncertain candidates. Leveraging a dynamic Anchor Tokens Cache, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: (1) Anchor-Guided Generation, which injects entropy-weighted anchor signals into masked positions to implicitly rectify attention toward the reliable global skeleton; and (2) Anchor-Perturbed Verification, which applies orthogonal perturbations to uncertain candidate tokens, destabilizing and remasking errors driven by fragile local consensus. Extensive experiments on math and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASRD outperforms recent remasking baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 6.4% while accelerating inference throughput by up to 7.2×.