Task-Specific Trust Evaluation for Multi-Hop Collaborator Selection via GNN-Aided Distributed Agentic AI

Abstract: The success of collaborative task completion among networked devices hinges on the effective selection of trustworthy collaborators. However, accurate task-specific trust evaluation of multi-hop collaborators can be extremely complex. The reason is that their trust evaluation is determined by a combination of diverse trust-related perspectives with different characteristics, including historical collaboration reliability, volatile and sensitive conditions of available resources for collaboration, as well as continuously evolving network topologies. To address this challenge, this paper presents a graph neural network (GNN)-aided distributed agentic AI (GADAI) framework, in which different aspects of devices' task-specific trustworthiness are separately evaluated and jointly integrated to facilitate multi-hop collaborator selection. GADAI first utilizes a GNN-assisted model to infer device trust from historical collaboration data. Specifically, it employs GNN to propagate and aggregate trust information among multi-hop neighbours, resulting in more accurate device reliability evaluation. Considering the dynamic and privacy-sensitive nature of device resources, a privacy-preserving resource evaluation mechanism is implemented using agentic AI. Each device hosts a large AI model-driven agent capable of autonomously determining whether its local resources meet the requirements of a given task, ensuring both task-specific and privacy-preserving trust evaluation. By combining the outcomes of these assessments, only the trusted devices can coordinate a task-oriented multi-hop cooperation path through their agents in a distributed manner. Experimental results show that our proposed GADAI outperforms the comparison algorithms in planning multi-hop paths that maximize the value of task completion.