ValueFlow: Measuring the Propagation of Value Perturbations in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Jinnuo Liu, Chuke Liu, Hua Shen · Feb 9, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Low trustUse this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.
Evidence quality
Low
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems increasingly consist of agents that observe and respond to one another's outputs. While value alignment is typically evaluated for isolated models, how value perturbations propagate through agent interactions remains poorly understood. We present ValueFlow, a perturbation-based framework that measures value drift in multi-agent systems via a 56-value valuation dataset derived from the Schwartz Value Survey, with agent value orientations scored using an LLM-as-a-judge protocol. ValueFlow decomposes value drift into agent-level response behavior and system-level structural effects, captured by two metrics: \b{eta}-susceptibility, an agent's sensitivity to perturbed peer value signals, and system susceptibility (SS), the effect of node-level perturbations on final system outputs.Experiments span across value dimensions, backbones, personas, and topologies, showing that susceptibility varies sharply across values and is strongly shaped by interaction structure, indicating that value alignment in multi-agent systems is a system-level property, not just an agent-level one. ValueFlow thus provides a principled basis for auditing and mitigating value propagation in deployed multi-agent systems.