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.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical question answering and clinical reasoning, yet their improvement remains constrained by static parametric knowledge and costly expert supervision. Self-evolving agents offer a promising alternative by enabling models to improve through iterative task generation and problem-solving. However, most existing self-evolving methods are designed for easily verifiable domains such as mathematics and coding, where solutions can be checked by exact answers or executable programs. Medical reasoning is fundamentally different: it is open-ended, knowledge-intensive, and often only partially verifiable. We present MedZERO, a self-evolving framework for open-ended medical reasoning. MedZERO couples an Examiner that generates frontier medical question-option pairs with a Reasoner that solves them through evidence-grounded multi-turn reasoning with external knowledge tools. To support reliable, continual improvement, MedZERO adopts controlled knowledge accumulation, which maintains temporary exploratory knowledge and curated persistent knowledge in reasoning. We evaluate MedZERO on five public medical reasoning benchmarks using 4B- and 8B-scale base models under open-ended evaluation. At both model scales, MedZERO achieves the highest average accuracy among the evaluated methods. Code available at https://github.com/IcecreamArtist/MedZERO.
Boxuan Wang, Zhuoyun Li, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Xiaowei Huang, Yi Dong
Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems can exhibit emergent behaviors through interaction, yet whether a similar phenomenon exists for reasoning alignment remains largely unexplored. We study whether agent interaction produces additional reference-grounded reasoning alignment beyond matched individual self-refinement, and introduce REMAP (Reference-Entailment-Matrix for Agentic Process), a framework that quantifies this effect through Semantic Coverage and interaction-specific alignment gains. Across diverse model families and two multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, we observe broadly positive interaction gains, particularly on reasoning content that depends on integrating evidence distributed across agents. These gains are consistently associated with independently measured peer-information recovery, while further analysis reveals composition-dependent heterogeneity effects and asymmetric information transfer across agent capability levels. Motivated by these findings, we further introduce a fact-level multi-agent communication framework that replaces full reasoning-trace exchange with compact, gap-aware, and selectively routed information. Our experiments show that compact fact exchange improves reasoning alignment and task performance while reducing communication overhead, whereas more selective communication exposes a trade-off between acquiring distributed information, retaining local content, and communication efficiency. Overall, our results show that collective emergent alignment can be quantified, linked to information-transfer patterns, and used to guide more effective multi-agent communication.
Boxuan Wang, Zhuoyun Li, Xinmiao Huang, Xiaowei Huang University of Liverpool, Yi Dong
This paper primarily demonstrates a method to quantitatively assess the alignment between multi-step, structured reasoning in large language models and human preferences. We introduce the Alignment Score, a semantic-level metric that compares a model-produced chain of thought traces with a human-preferred reference by constructing semantic-entropy-based matrices over intermediate steps and measuring their divergence. Our analysis shows that Alignment Score tracks task accuracy across models and hop depths, and peaks at 2-hop reasoning. Empirical results further indicate that misalignment at greater reasoning depths is driven mainly by alignment errors such as thematic shift and redundant reasoning. Viewing chain sampling as drawing from a distribution over reasoning paths, we empirically demonstrate a strong and consistent correlation between Alignment Score and accuracy, readability, and coherence, supporting its use as a diagnostic signal. The code is available.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
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.
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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