Micro-Collaborative Poisoning: A Distributed Attack on RAG Systems

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language models by grounding outputs in external knowledge sources, but this dependency also creates a surface for poisoning attacks. This paper introduces Micro-Collaborative Poisoning, a distributed attack in which a false target claim is divided across multiple locally plausible documents instead of being concentrated in a single malicious passage. We evaluate the attack across 108 RAG configurations by varying dataset, retriever architecture, retrieval depth, database composition, number of poisoned databases, and generator model. The results indicate that Micro-Collaborative Poisoning is not driven by a single dominant poisoned passage, but by the accumulation of weak adversarial signals across retrieved sources. Increasing top-$k$ and poisoning multiple databases make it more likely that these signals will appear together in the retrieved context, while clean database diversity and stronger retrievers can reduce their influence. The document-level poisoning visibility analysis further shows that this threat is difficult to expose through isolated document inspection, since Micro-Collaborative Poisoning achieves downstream influence while leaving a weaker explicit poisoning signature than direct poisoning.