arXiv AI

Moderation by Interrogation: Uncovering Concealed Intent in Agent Social Networks

The paper introduces Bot‑Mod, a moderation framework that detects malicious intent in multi‑agent systems by interrogating agents with diagnostic probes and updating a Bayesian posterior over candidate intents. Bot‑Mod starts with a content‑only prior and refines its inference using moderator‑assigned likelihoods until a stopping criterion is reached. Evaluations on the Molt‑Intent dataset, an external social engineering dataset, and three agent LLMs show that Bot‑Mod outperforms content‑only moderators, a fine‑tuned classifier, and judge‑based interrogators, achieving higher F1 scores both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution.

arXiv AI
Sep 12

Characterizing Bluesky Content Moderation Service: From Automation of Service to Landscape of Harms

The study audits Bluesky’s Moderation Service (BMS) using its 10.6 million public moderation labels from 2025. It finds that BMS operates as a human‑AI collaboration: sexual and graphic content is flagged automatically in seconds, while more nuanced or high‑stakes content requires human review that can take hours or days. The system shows high precision (0.837) but low recall (0.222), with annotators detecting 4.5 times more harmful content than the system, and clustering reveals harms ranging from hostility toward protected groups to the spread of explicit material.

By Pushpdeep Singh, Sayeh Jarollahi, Ayan Majumdar, Vabuk Pahari, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Krishna P. Gummadi, Ingmar Weber, Abhisek Dash
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Agentic Detection of Online Conspiracies

The paper presents an agentic framework for detecting conspiratorial content in social media by inferring the speaker’s intent rather than merely identifying explicit claims. It leverages social context and adaptive tool use, demonstrating superior performance over text-only and non-agentic models on a large Hebrew tweet dataset spanning election cycles and the COVID pandemic. The study highlights the importance of context-aware, reasoning-driven approaches for accurate conspiracy detection.

By Lior Biton, Oren Tsur
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Belief Cascades Drive Persuasion in LLM Agent Networks

The paper introduces a controlled testbed to study how goal‑directed persuaders shift stances in networks of large language model agents, using real‑world ego‑network topologies. Experiments across four LLM backbones, five graph structures, and 55 policy statements show that persuasion dynamics depend on topology, competition, topic, and model prior. The study finds that direct exposure predicts stance change, peer relays have measurable influence, and that post‑text analysis alone misses important movement, highlighting the need to evaluate multi‑agent persuasion through trajectory‑level processes, belief probes, exposure provenance, and action logs.

By Haoyi Qiu, Genglin Liu, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Saadia Gabriel, Chien-Sheng Wu, Nanyun Peng
arXiv AI
Oct 27

LLM-Augmented Agent-Based Simulation of Cyber Social Agents

The paper introduces the concept of Cyber Social Agents (CSAs), automated actors on social media defined by a taxonomy of archetypes based on operational tactics and rhetorical style. It integrates this taxonomy into a large language model (LLM)-driven simulation where agents interact within a network, allowing the study of how diverse agent types influence information diffusion and social influence. The approach bridges rule‑based agent models and LLM‑powered simulations by parameterizing generated agents with empirically grounded CSA personas.

By Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Caught in the Act: Probes Effectively Detect Sabotage and Catch Unverbalized Deception

The paper presents a white‑box deception detection system that uses probes trained on the largest deception dataset (FIBS) and a novel architecture aggregating across layers and tokens. The probes achieve 98.8% AUC on SHADE‑Arena, outperforming a text‑monitoring baseline, and reach up to 99.7% AUC when detecting introspective deception that cannot be inferred from context alone. They also effectively detect deception in open‑weight models on politically sensitive topics and when models are pressured about their beliefs.

By Oskar J. Hollinsworth, Alex F. Spies, Tigist Diriba, Adam Gleave, Chris Cundy