The One-Pixel of Reasoning: One Truthful Relation Is Enough to Mislead LLM Agents

Jinwei Hu, Youcheng Sun, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang

Can one sentence manipulate an agent's belief by targeting a single implicit warrant linking evidence to a conclusion? In this paper, we introduce the one-relation attack (ORA), a novel cognitive attack on this inferential relation. ORA localizes a critical implicit warrant and performs a one-relation intervention using a single source-grounded sentence that qualifies this warrant and steers the agent toward an incorrect belief. Across eighteen models on biomedical inference and vulnerability detection, best-of-$10 attacks overturn initially correct answers at mean rates of 54.9% for proprietary and 80.0% for open-weight models. Attacks also transfer without victim feedback, and paired controls support the roles of targeting and qualification. Moreover, successful sentences can pass source-support checks and evade identification, and multi-agent debate raises team error from 50.0% to 59.5% in our balanced stress test. These findings establish implicit warrants as a cognitive attack surface for manipulating agents' beliefs.