DeFA is a dependency-guided framework that attributes failures in large language model agents by constructing an event dependency graph and a failure propagation graph from protocol relations and semantic dependencies. It identifies violating events, traces their sources and effects, and determines the decisive error, responsible agent, and error category. The method supports long trajectories through segmentation and has shown superior accuracy on text, image, and video tasks, while its diagnostic feedback can improve agent performance on subsequent tasks.
By Bo Deng, Xinlei Zheng, Yi Wei, Kang Zhou, Chongyang Tao, Renzhao Liang, Xuanren Chen, Lifan Guo, Chi Zhang
arXiv:2606. 03467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit remarkable collaborative capabilities in complex multi-step tasks.
By Taiyu Zhu, Yifan Wu, Weilin Jin, Ying Li, Gang Huang
arXiv:2607. 07989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based multi-agent systems enable complex problem solving through coordinated reasoning and action, but their distributed structure also introduces new challenges in diagnosing system-level failures.
By Yufei Xia, Anjun Gao, Yueyang Quan, Zhuqing Liu, Minghong Fang
arXiv:2608. 06346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agentic systems have shown remarkable capabilities in complex domains, while suffering from cascading errors and difficulty in debugging.
By Yunjia Qi, Zehua Yin, Xintong Shi, Hao Peng, Songyuanyi Lu, Yixian Liu, Richeng Xuan, Yuhong Liu, Zhichao Hu, Xiaozhi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Juanzi Li
The paper introduces DCFA, a training‑free framework for attributing failures in large language model‑based multi‑agent systems. DCFA uses a global module to build causal‑inspired dependency graphs from system traces, pinpointing the earliest decisive error, and a local module that refines this attribution through counterfactual reasoning. Experiments on the Who&When benchmark across six LLMs demonstrate that DCFA improves step‑level accuracy by up to 8.27% over existing baselines.
By Zehao Wang, Lanjun Wang, Shilong Jin, Junjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
arXiv:2602.02475v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy...
By Shraddha Barke, Arnav Goyal, Alind Khare, Avaljot Singh, Suman Nath, Chetan Bansal
arXiv:2607. 12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Failure attribution for LLM-based agentic systems, i.
By Samuel Yeh, Yiwen Zhu, Shaleen Deep, Sharon Li
arXiv:2608.29646v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong potential in solving complex tasks through multi-step reasoning, yet they remain vulnerable t...
By Jiayi Zhang, Zexin Wang, Degang Sun, Changhua Pei, Fei Sun, Gaogang Xie, Jingjing Li
The paper introduces Adaptive Influence Graphs (AIGs), a two‑stage framework that first converts a failed trace into a structured graph and then navigates it to pinpoint the critical error in multi‑agent large language model systems. Experiments across multiple models demonstrate that richer trace representations and adaptive graph construction improve failure attribution, with AIGs achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on the Who&When benchmark. The study shows that both the diagnosing model and the way traces are represented and explored are crucial for accurate failure attribution.
By Yarden Bakish, Amir Dudai, Roy Ganz, Oren Nuriel, Elad Ben Avraham, Mor Shpigel Nacson, Ron Litman
arXiv:2608. 09153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production AI agents fail when their context sources -- system prompts, knowledge bases, tool descriptions, and procedural skills -- contain errors or gaps.
By Yikai Zhao, Pradeep Kumar Misra, Saurabh Pandey
arXiv:2608. 15242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a long-horizon agent execution fails, outcome-level evaluation reveals the unsuccessful result but not where the decisive error entered the trajectory.
By Yunfei Zhang, Boyu Feng, Changhua Pei, Zexin Wang, Zhihuang Peng, Xinlong Liu, Hengyue Jiang, Difeng Ma, Jiayi Zhang, Yongzhou Yao, Yanan Zhao, Fei Sun, Yintong Huo, Zhaoyang Liu, Jingjing Li, Gaogang Xie, Dan Pei
EDGE is a framework that attributes multiple related errors in multi-agent large language model systems by constructing an error dependency graph from observed error events. It validates a reliable causal subset through counterfactual rollout and uses this inference graph to guide a two-stage LLM-as-judge detector for error attribution. Experiments on TRAIL and MAST demonstrate that EDGE improves category-level multi-error attribution across most models and settings, and that the graph aids explanation and repair analysis.
By Jun Hou, Priya Pitre, Yi Fang, Xuan Wang