Hide-and-Shill: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Market Manipulation Detection in Symphony-a Decentralized Multi-Agent System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework called Hide-and-Shill for detecting market manipulation in decentralized finance, leveraging advanced algorithms and multi-modal data integration within a trust-aware, peer-to-peer system.

Contribution

It presents a new MARL framework with innovations like GRPO, a theory-based reward, and multi-modal agent pipeline, enabling real-time, decentralized manipulation detection without centralized oversight.

Findings

Achieved high detection accuracy in real-world simulations

Validated robustness against adversarial manipulation

Demonstrated effective causal attribution of market manipulation

Abstract

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has introduced a new era of permissionless financial innovation but also led to unprecedented market manipulation. Without centralized oversight, malicious actors coordinate shilling campaigns and pump-and-dump schemes across various platforms. We propose a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework for decentralized manipulation detection, modeling the interaction between manipulators and detectors as a dynamic adversarial game. This framework identifies suspicious patterns using delayed token price reactions as financial indicators.Our method introduces three innovations: (1) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to enhance learning stability in sparse-reward and partially observable settings; (2) a theory-based reward function inspired by rational expectations and information asymmetry, differentiating price discovery from manipulation noise; and (3) a multi-modal agent pipeline that integrates LLM-based semantic features, social graph signals, and on-chain market data for informed decision-making.The framework is integrated within the Symphony system, a decentralized multi-agent architecture enabling peer-to-peer agent execution and trust-aware learning through distributed logs, supporting chain-verifiable evaluation. Symphony promotes adversarial co-evolution among strategic actors and maintains robust manipulation detection without centralized oracles, enabling real-time surveillance across global DeFi ecosystems.Trained on 100,000 real-world discourse episodes and validated in adversarial simulations, Hide-and-Shill achieves top performance in detection accuracy and causal attribution. This work bridges multi-agent systems with financial surveillance, advancing a new paradigm for decentralized market intelligence. All resources are available at the Hide-and-Shill GitHub repository to promote open research and reproducibility.