Adaptive Accountability in Networked MAS: Tracing and Mitigating Emergent Norms at Scale

Abstract: Large-scale networked multi-agent systems increasingly underpin critical infrastructure, yet their collective behavior can drift toward undesirable emergent norms that elude conventional governance mechanisms. We introduce an adaptive accountability framework that (i) continuously traces responsibility flows through a lifecycle-aware audit ledger, (ii) detects harmful emergent norms online via decentralized sequential hypothesis tests, and (iii) deploys local policy and reward-shaping interventions that realign agents with system-level objectives in near real time. We prove a bounded-compromise theorem showing that whenever the expected intervention cost exceeds an adversary's payoff, the long-run proportion of compromised interactions is bounded by a constant strictly less than one. Extensive high-performance simulations with up to 100 heterogeneous agents, partial observability, and stochastic communication graphs show that our framework prevents collusion and resource hoarding in at least 90% of configurations, boosts average collective reward by 12-18%, and lowers the Gini inequality index by up to 33% relative to a PPO baseline. These results demonstrate that a theoretically principled accountability layer can induce ethically aligned, self-regulating behavior in complex MAS without sacrificing performance or scalability.