Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates. Failed runs tend to be longer and exhibit redundant exploration or looping, suggesting that some failures may be detectable before completion.
arXiv:2608. 02464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents fail mid-episode -- they loop, cascade tool errors, drift off goal, fabricate results, or silently absorb corrupted content -- and the standard remedy, judging every step with a second LLM, costs more than the agent itself.
By Sunny Dubey
arXiv:2607. 06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable.
By Kai Ruan, Zihe Huang, Ziqi Zhou, Qianshan Wei, Xuan Wang, Hao Sun
arXiv:2607. 11098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents are mostly evaluated assuming all tools work.
By Aritra Mazumder, Nusrat jahan Lia
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
arXiv:2606. 19356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped.
By Anantha Sharma
arXiv:2608. 08239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM routers promise efficiency by matching each request to the cheapest adequate model, and are increasingly applied per step inside multi-step agents.
By Ashritha Gonuguntla
Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance.
arXiv:2607. 10608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory is becoming a core component of long-horizon AI agents, allowing agents to reuse past experience when operating web browsers, software tools, and other interactive environments.
By Yixiong Chen, Xinyi Bai, Alan Yuille
arXiv:2606. 09863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can fail silently by asserting task completion when the environment state shows otherwise.
By Laksh Advani
arXiv:2608. 06701v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fixing GitHub issues in large-scale projects is a long-horizon task, especially when a fix requires changes across multiple locations or the issue description lacks the information needed to localize and repair it.
By Shuyang Liu, Saman Dehghan, Ji Young Kim, Jatin Ganhotra, Martin Hirzel, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand
arXiv:2606. 10241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous improvement loops are hard to trust because the improvement process is usually external scaffolding bolted onto the agent: failures go unlogged, diagnoses cannot be replayed, and promote-or-discard decisions land in a side database rather than the agent's own history.
By Yohei Nakajima