arXiv AI

Model or Harness? An Interaction-Centric Taxonomy for Localizing Agent Failures

arXiv:2607. 28802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing evaluations often reduce agent failures to system-level outcomes, obscuring where the fault originated and which intervention would improve the agent system.

arXiv AI
Jul 21

Fantastic Adaptive Taxonomies and How to Use Them

arXiv:2607. 16387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An agent system's execution traces record how it fails, and procedures that improve such a system without changing model weights (trajectory selection, prompt and workflow optimization, runtime monitoring) read these traces for feedback.

By Mert Cemri, Andrei Cojocaru, Melissa Pan, Shu Liu, Shubham Agarwal, Alexander Krentsel, Jay Tang, Kannan Ramchandran, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Matei Zaharia, Alex Dimakis, Ion Stoica
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Locating Hidden Failures Makes Long-Horizon Agents More Reliable

The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.

By Salman Rahman, Yubin Kim, Mihir Parmar, A. Ali Heydari, Genglin Liu, Simon A. Lee, Weizhi Zhang, Arian Hosseini, Ahmed A. Metwally, Yuzhe Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Xin Liu, Pavel Izmailov, Saadia Gabriel, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Hamid Palangi
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Grow the Harness, Not the Context: From Strategy-Free Scaffolds to Reusable Specialist Agents

The paper introduces Growing Harness, a training method that transforms recurring control logic in large language model agents into reusable executable code, reducing reliance on the model for task-specific decisions. By using strategy-free scaffolds, failure-guided code repair, and success-first gating, the approach learns a shared harness that improves performance across multiple benchmarks and model sizes. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus and WebArena-Verified show significant gains in success rates and substantial reductions in LLM calls and inference cost compared to traditional tool‑calling agents.

By Laizhen Li, Jiarui Li, Juanjuan Zhao, Kejiang Ye, Ye Li, Cheng-zhong Xu, Xitong Gao
arXiv AI
Aug 20

ComponentBench: Diagnosing Component-Level Failures in Computer-Use Agents

ComponentBench is a new benchmark that evaluates computer‑use agents at the component level on modern web UIs. It contains 97 canonical UI components and 2,910 programmatically verified tasks, along with cleaned human reference trajectories for measuring task success and interaction efficiency. The benchmark also offers a scalable pipeline for auditing structural difficulty and synthesizing failure analyses across tasks and component families.

By Tianchen Guan, Xinlei Lin, Royce Cheng-Yue, Xiangjun Wang, Shuyan Zhou
arXiv AI
3d ago

Agent Error Dataset: Scaling 50,000 Error--Diagnosis Pairs for Failure Analysis and Error-Aware Post-Training

The Agent Error Dataset (AED) presents 50,228 error–diagnosis pairs collected from 9,961 source tasks across 33 environments, 19 harness families, and 23 policy models in text‑based agent systems. A five‑stage Agentic Error‑to‑Training (AET) pipeline generates diagnoses and proposed corrections, verifies them against recorded evidence, and creates separate training views for diagnosis and actor recovery. Experiments show that first‑proposal corrections improve verifier pass rates from 18.4% to 51.1%, and fine‑tuning with full‑diagnosis data raises Qwen3‑8B’s exact‑step agreement from 47.2% to 63.6% on a holdout set.

By Kunlun Zhu, Xuyan Ye, Yibo Li, Cheng Qian, Beibin Li, Heng Ji