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:2608. 06909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate through long-horizon trajectories involving user instructions, tool use, external observations, and memory.
By Jing Chen, Yang Sun, Li Zhang, Lin Xu, Jie Shi
The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."
By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
arXiv:2607. 23804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context attribution methods for large language models (LLMs) identify which input context contributes to the model response.
By Quoc-Huy Trinh, Lin Zhu, Sebastian Szyller
arXiv:2608. 05124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long context reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is usually constrained by the fact that a single inference trajectory has to simultaneously explore the context, store intermediate state, verify evidence, and produce the final answer.
By Purbesh Mitra, Sennur Ulukus
arXiv:2606. 05402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce reasoning traces with non-linear structures, such as backtracking and self-correction, that complicate the evaluation and monitoring of the reasoning process.
By Jinu Lee, Shivam Agarwal, Amruta Parulekar, Siddarth Madala, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Julia Hockenmaier
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:2606. 10646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Token-level credit assignment remains a key obstacle for reinforcement learning (RL) in large language models (LLMs), where RL recipes typically treat all tokens equally, failing to distinguish decisive reasoning steps from routine formatting or fluent filler.
By Zhichen Dong, Yang Li, Yuhan Sun, Weixun Wang, Yijia Luo, Zinian Peng, Taiheng Ye, Chao Yang, Wenbo Su, Yu Cheng, Bo Zheng, Junchi Yan
arXiv:2607. 19345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models that generate step-by-step reasoning traces have achieved strong performance on complex tasks, and extending them to long-context settings has emerged as an important frontier.
By Lizhe Fang, Weizhou Shen, Tianyi Tang, Yisen Wang
The paper introduces RECAP, a redundancy-aware credit assignment method that improves reasoning efficiency in large language models by assigning credit to each reasoning step based on its downstream role and contribution to the correct answer. RECAP uses a semantic dependency graph to measure structural responsibility and evaluates step efficacy via changes in gold-answer log-likelihood, enabling step-specific updates without requiring a separate reward model or concise trajectories. Experiments on two 7B models across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that RECAP enhances the accuracy-efficiency trade-off, boosting pass@1 by 2.0–3.7 percentage points while cutting reasoning tokens by 8–31% compared to GRPO.
By Yuqing Zhou, Hong Wang, Manqing Mao, Zhuoer Wang, Samson Koelle, Jie Yuan, Yanjun Lin, James Feng, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Ziwei Zhu, Wei Niu
arXiv:2607. 10562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the multi-hop reasoning capabilities of large language models remains a significant challenge.
By JungMin Yun, JuneHyoung Kwon, YoungBin Kim
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