paperMay 2026Unreviewed

FlowSteer: Prompt-Only Workflow Steering Exposes Planning-Time Vulnerabilities in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Fanxiao Li, Jiaying Wu, Tingchao Fu, Natasha Jaques, Wei Zhou, Min-Yen Kan

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models (LLMs) increasingly adopt planner--executor architectures, where planners convert prompts into subtasks, roles, dependencies, and routing paths. This flexibility enables adaptive coordination, but exposes an attack surface in workflow formation: prompts can shape agent organization without modifying MAS infrastructure. We study this risk through social influence probing workflows to identify high-impact subtasks and malicious-signal prop

Cite

@misc{li2026flowsteer,
  title = {{FlowSteer: Prompt-Only Workflow Steering Exposes Planning-Time Vulnerabilities in Multi-Agent LLM Systems}},
  author = {Fanxiao Li and Jiaying Wu and Tingchao Fu and Natasha Jaques and Wei Zhou and Min-Yen Kan},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  eprint = {2605.11514},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11514}
}