Multi-Agent Collusion and the J-Space

Abstract

LLM agents are increasingly deployed in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), and they introduce the risk of coordination among agents that might escape human oversight. The J-space has been used to uncover deception in single LLMs, but its use for uncovering and steering collusion between agents remains unexplored. We show, with interpretability experiments on DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B) on the NARCBench collusion benchmark, that colluding agents' J-space holds the collusion itself: before replying, 86% of colluders represent misrepresentation, concealment or remorse. In a steganographic card-counting task, the receiver's J-space holds a hidden count, and causal interventions alter its count. We also introduce the Jacobian Pair Contrast (J-PACT), an unsupervised method for detecting collusion between agents. We evaluate J-PACT on four open-weight models: GPT-OSS-20B, Llama-3.3-70B-IT, Qwen3-32B, and DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B). J-PACT retains 85% of the above-chance AUROC of supervised NARCBench probes, matches them on steganographic scenarios, and names the colluding pair up to its complement in 99% of detected runs.