arXiv AI

Detect Before You Attribute: Cascade Failure Attribution for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Can Failed Trajectories Reveal Where Agents Go Wrong? Agentic Failure Attribution Without Step-Level Labels

The paper introduces SOAP, a method for attributing failures in large language model agents without requiring step-level labels or a separate set of successful trajectories. SOAP builds a spectral reference space from LLM representations to assign base error scores to each step, then uses attention-based soft dependencies to propagate downstream error signals back to their likely upstream causes. Experiments demonstrate that SOAP outperforms existing baselines in accurately identifying decisive steps responsible for task failures.

By Do Nguyen-Thanh, Junlin Fang, Bing Li, Zhen Fang, Sean Du
arXiv AI
Oct 2

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
Sep 2

EDGE: Error Dependency Graph-Guided Multi-Error Attribution in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

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
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
Oct 9

Error-Propagation Modeling for Failure Attribution in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

The paper introduces EMFA, a method for attributing failures in large language model-based multi-agent systems by identifying the decisive error—an agent–step pair whose correction would restore correct execution. EMFA builds a structured representation of the failed trajectory, models error propagation and persistent loops, and applies propagation-aware screening with counterfactual verification to pinpoint the decisive error. On the Who&When benchmark, EMFA outperforms prior methods, improving step-level attribution accuracy by 3.45 and 4.40 percentage points on two subsets.

By Jiaqi Liao, Yuanzhao Zhai, Huanxi Liu, Xu Zhang, Zheming Zhuang, Dawei Feng, Bo Ding, Huaimin Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 8

Error-Propagation Modeling for Failure Attribution in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

The paper introduces EMFA, a method for pinpointing the decisive error in large‑language‑model‑based multi‑agent systems. EMFA builds a structured representation of a failed execution, models how errors cascade and loop, and then screens candidates with propagation awareness before verifying them counterfactually. On the Who&When benchmark, EMFA outperforms prior methods, improving step‑level attribution accuracy by 3.45 and 4.40 percentage points on two subsets.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

DCFA: Dual-view Causal-inspired Attribution for Failure Reasoning in LLM-based Multi-agent Systems

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