We are thrilled to congratulate the team from the University of Liverpool for winning the 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, United States, from July 2 to 7, 2026.

Their award-winning paper, “𝗟𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵𝘀: 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗠𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶-𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗕𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗳 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝗶𝗮 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲,” was authored by Jinwei Hu , Xinmiao Huang, Yi Dong, and Xiaowei Huang, from the School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with Youcheng Sun from the MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence).

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁?
As Large Language Models LLMs increasingly operate as the core of autonomous agents and synthesize information from multiple sources, their tendency to construct coherent narratives can become a new attack surface.
Inspired by cinematic montage, where the arrangement of separate shots can create new and potentially misleading meanings, the authors introduce cognitive collusion: multiple agents can manipulate a victim agent using only truthful fragmented information — without fabricated information, hidden channels, or backdoors. By strategically selecting and arranging these fragments, attackers can lead the model to form and believe a convincing but false conclusion.
They further introduce Generative Montage, a multi-agent framework for constructing and distributing such deceptive narratives based on real-world rumor events. Experiments across 14 LLM families show that this attack is highly effective, and that stronger reasoning capabilities may sometimes make models even more vulnerable and overconfident.
These findings highlight the need for AI safeguards that examine not only whether individual pieces of information are true, but also how they are combined and interpreted.

You can find the whole presentation made by Jinwei Hu and the poster: https://robustifai.eu/dissemination/

Congratulations to the whole team on this well-deserved recognition at ACL 2026!