Hemang Jain


2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents through tool use, planning, and decision-making abilities, leading to their widespread adoption across diverse tasks. As task complexity grows, multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly used to solve problems collaboratively. However, safety and security of these systems remains largely under-explored. Existing benchmarks and datasets predominantly focus on single-agent settings, failing to capture the unique vulnerabilities of multi-agent dynamics and co-ordination. To address this gap, we introduce Threats and Attacks in Multi-Agent Systems (TAMAS), a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness and safety of multi-agent LLM systems. TAMAS includes five distinct scenarios comprising 300 adversarial instances across six attack types and 211 tools, along with 100 harmless tasks. We assess system performance across ten backbone LLMs and three agent interaction configurations from Autogen and CrewAI frameworks, highlighting critical challenges and failure modes in current multi-agent deployments. Furthermore, we introduce Effective Robustness Score (ERS) to assess the tradeoff between safety and task effectiveness of these frameworks. Our findings show that multi-agent systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, underscoring the urgent need for stronger defenses. TAMAS provides a foundation for systematically studying and improving the safety of multi-agent LLM systems. Code and dataset is available at https://github.com/microsoft/TAMAS.

2025

Detecting toxicity in online multimodal environments, such as memes, remains a challenging task due to the complex contextual connections across modalities (e.g., text and visual), which demand both common-sense reasoning and contextual awareness. To bridge this gap, we propose a hybrid neurosymbolic framework that unifies (1) distillation of implicit contextual knowledge (e.g., sarcasm, cultural references) from Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) and (2) infusion of explicit relational semantics through sub-graphs from Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our approach, Knowledge-Infused Distilled Vision-Language Model (KID-VLM), over the state-of-the-art baselines across AUC and F1, with improvements of 0.5%, and 10.6%, respectively, in HatefulMemes Benchmark across variants. Further, KID-VLM demonstrates better generalizability and achieves the best performance across all baselines in the HarMeme Dataset with a 6.3% and 3.2% in F1 and AUC.Given the contextual complexity of the toxicity detection, KID-VLM showcases the significance of learning compact models (~500M parameters) from both explicit (i.e., KG) and implicit (i.e., LVLMs) contextual cues incorporated through a hybrid neurosymbolic approach. Our codes and pretrained models are publicly available.