StepFinder: A Temporal Semantic Framework for Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems
arXiv:2606. 03467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit remarkable collaborative capabilities in complex multi-step tasks.
arXiv:2606. 03467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit remarkable collaborative capabilities in complex multi-step tasks.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 07989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based multi-agent systems enable complex problem solving through coordinated reasoning and action, but their distributed structure also introduces new challenges in diagnosing system-level failures.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 00765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks through long trajectories involving reasoning steps, tool calls, and inter-agent communication.
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.
arXiv:2602.02475v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy...
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.
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.
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.