@inproceedings{wu-etal-2026-cia,
    title = "{CIA}: Inferring the Communication Topology from {LLM}-based Multi-Agent Systems",
    author = "Wu, Yongxuan  and
      Lin, Xixun  and
      Zhang, He  and
      Sun, Nan  and
      Wang, Kun  and
      Zhou, Chuan  and
      Pan, Shirui  and
      Cao, Yanan",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.815/",
    pages = "17917--17933",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. Central to MAS is the communication topology which governs how agents exchange information internally. Consequently, the security of communication topologies has attracted increasing attention. In this paper, we investigate a critical privacy risk: MAS communication topologies can be inferred under a restrictive black-box setting, exposing system vulnerabilities and posing significant intellectual property threats. To explore this risk, we propose \textbf{Communication Inference Attack (CIA)}, a novel attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents' reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the proposed global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. Extensive experiments on MAS with optimized communication topologies demonstrate the effectiveness of CIA, achieving an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC of up to 0.99, thereby revealing the substantial privacy risk in MAS. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/aabbbcd/CIA}."
}