arXiv AI

When Failures Propagate: Causal Failure Attribution in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces AgenticRAG-FP, an interventional benchmark designed to attribute causal failures in agentic retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems. By injecting a certified fault at a specified hop and re‑executing the downstream trajectory, the benchmark evaluates whether post‑hoc diagnostics can correctly identify the fault’s location. Experiments on MuSiQue questions show that coverage‑based diagnosis performs well at hop 1 but poorly at later hops, while counterfactual probes reveal varying diagnostic success depending on propagation depth.

arXiv AI
4d ago

REALHOP: Rethinking Multi-Hop Reasoning Evaluation via Behavioral Auditing

REALHOP introduces a behavioral auditing framework to assess multi‑hop reasoning by measuring the Behavioral Necessity Rate (BNR), which quantifies how often removing targeted evidence prevents correct answers. Across five benchmarks, the framework reveals a wide gap between annotated reasoning chains and actual evidence dependence, with panel‑mean BNR ranging from 16.6% to 48.9%. By re‑binding entities, factorizing relations, adding competing paths, and placing evidence at traceable locations, REALHOP raises BNR dramatically—from 27.4% to 94.4% on MuSiQue questions—while maintaining high overall accuracy and improving performance on long‑context tasks.

By Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Yaoming Li, Chenxu Liu, Mengzhou Wu, Tong Yang, Maxm Pan
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
arXiv AI
2d ago

DeFA: Dependency-Guided Failure Attribution for LLM Agents

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 AI
Aug 7

TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories

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 AI
Aug 28

Invocation-Level Reliability of Tool-Using Agents

The paper investigates the reliability of tool‑using agents, focusing on two failure modes: selecting the wrong tool and constructing incorrect arguments. It introduces a correct‑invocation rate metric to distinguish these errors and evaluates five open‑weight models on multi‑step tasks up to depth 8, finding that by depth 6 about 70% of a model’s clean‑context capability is lost due to earlier mistakes. The study reveals that exact‑match scoring against a fixed gold trajectory forces severity and recovery parameters to extreme values, and proposes a conditional‑on‑state scoring remedy that yields more realistic severity estimates.

By Afiya Noorain, Subhranshu Mohanty, Amritesh Banerjee, Abhijit Dasgupta
arXiv AI
Aug 28

FaulT-Bench: Towards Benchmarking Network Troubleshooting LLM Agents under Unreliable User Tickets

FaulT-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 200 network troubleshooting scenarios across eight topologies, designed to test large‑language‑model agents on realistic, noisy user tickets that may contain false premises or incorrect fault claims. The benchmark includes 72 rewritten tickets that vary reporter confidence and detail while keeping the network state constant, allowing isolation of the impact of ticket wording on diagnosis. Evaluation of agents such as SADE, ReAct, and Claude Code shows they perform well on accurate tickets but degrade sharply on misleading or healthy‑network tickets, revealing differing failure modes and highlighting the importance of robust reasoning over unreliable input.

By Kuan-Hao Tseng, Niruth Bogahawatta, Yasod Ginige, Kunjan Patel, Kosta Dakic, Suranga Seneviratne