AdvEvo-MARL: Shaping Internalized Safety through Adversarial Co-Evolution in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission14403 Authors

Keywords: multi-agent system, safety, reinforcement learning, multimodal large language models

TL;DR: a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that enables all task agents to jointly acquire defensive capabilities

Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems excel at planning, tool use, and role coordination, but their openness and interaction complexity also expose them to jailbreak, prompt-injection, and adversarial collaboration. Existing defenses fall into two lines: (i) self-verification that asks each agent to pre-filter unsafe instructions before execution, and (ii) external guard modules that police behaviors. The former often underperforms because a standalone agent lacks sufficient capacity to detect cross-agent unsafe chains and delegation-induced risks; the latter increases system overhead and creates a single-point-of-failure—once compromised, system-wide safety collapses, and adding more guards worsens cost and complexity. To solve these challenges, we propose AdvEvo-MARL, a co-evolutionary multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that internalizes safety into task agents. Rather than relying on external guards, AdvEvo-MARL jointly optimizes attackers (which synthesize evolving jailbreak prompts) and defenders (task agents trained to both accomplish their duties and resist attacks) in adversarial learning environments. To stabilize learning and foster cooperation, we introduce a public baseline for advantage estimation: agents within the same functional group share a group-level mean-return baseline, enabling lower-variance updates and stronger intra-group coordination. Across representative attack scenarios, AdvEvo-MARL consistently keeps attack-success rate (ASR) below 20\%, whereas baselines reach up to 38.33\%, while preserving—and sometimes improving—task accuracy (up to +3.67\% on reasoning tasks). These results show that safety and utility can be jointly improved without relying on extra guard agents or added system overhead.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 14403