Zhuoyun Li, Boxuan Wang, Jinwei Hu, Xiaowei Huang, Yi Dong
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used as cognitive interfaces that shape how users interpret evidence, communicate, and make decisions. As deployed systems become more multimodal, tool-using, and multi-agent, safety failures no longer arise only from isolated harmful outputs, but also from how agents update, store, and propagate epistemic commitments across retrieval, memory, tools, and peer communication. In this paper, we define belief as an engineering abstraction for evidence-based commitments that guide downstream action. Building on this view, we propose the Explicit Belief Multi-Agent System (EB-MAS), which externalizes belief states into a structured substrate, uses belief operators to propose candidate updates, and applies a Cognitive Firewall to bound or reject updates that are weakly evidenced but strongly driven by vulnerability cues. We also discuss the risk of group belief at the group level, including manufactured consensus, collusion, and cascading misinformation, and outline practical integration challenges around grounding, false positives, scalability, and ethical misuse. Therefore, scalable agent safety requires not only better output filtering or stronger base models, but also explicit interfaces for tracing, calibrating, and constraining belief revision at runtime.
Jinwei Hu, Xinmiao Huang, Youcheng Sun Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and The University of Manchester, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang University of Liverpool
As large language models (LLMs) transition to autonomous agents synthesizing real-time information, their reasoning capabilities introduce an unexpected attack surface. This paper introduces a novel threat where colluding agents steer victim beliefs using only truthful evidence fragments distributed through public channels, without relying on covert communications, backdoors, or falsified documents. By exploiting LLMs’ overthinking tendency, we formalize the first cognitive collusion attack and propose Generative Montage: a Writer-Editor-Director framework that constructs deceptive narratives through adversarial debate and coordinated posting of evidence fragments, causing victims to internalize and propagate fabricated conclusions. To study this risk, we develop CoPHEME, a dataset derived from real-world rumor events, and simulate attacks across diverse LLM families. Our results show pervasive vulnerability across 14 LLM families: attack success rates reach 74.4% for proprietary models and 70.6% for open-weights models. Counterintuitively, stronger reasoning capabilities increase susceptibility, with reasoning-specialized models showing higher attack success than base models or prompts. Furthermore, these false beliefs then cascade to downstream judges, achieving over 60% deception rates, highlighting a socio-technical vulnerability in how LLM-based agents interact with dynamic information environments.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表