The paper introduces Continual Search, an iterative framework that guides large language models to persistently search for diagnostic evidence in long AI agent execution logs, addressing the limitations of one-shot judgments. Evaluated on four existing RCA benchmarks and a new large-scale dataset called MegaRCA-Mix, Continual Search consistently boosts attribution performance, achieving a 40% F1 improvement for GPT‑5.5 on MegaRCA‑Mix. The results show that effective search can outweigh raw model scale, enabling lower-tier models to outperform higher-tier ones in root‑cause attribution tasks.
arXiv:2608. 05212v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search agents tackle challenging questions through long-horizon web interactions, a process that is both complex and fragile: small reasoning errors may propagate through long, noisy trajectories into fluent but incorrect answers.
arXiv:2606. 03467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit remarkable collaborative capabilities in complex multi-step tasks.
arXiv:2608. 15242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a long-horizon agent execution fails, outcome-level evaluation reveals the unsuccessful result but not where the decisive error entered the trajectory.
The paper investigates automated failure attribution (AFA) in large language model (LLM)-based agentic systems, where multiple agents collaborate on complex tasks. It finds that LLMs contain sufficient internal knowledge to attribute failures but often fail to output the correct step, revealing a knows‑but‑won’t‑say gap. To address this, the authors introduce grafting—a manual intervention that leverages latent model knowledge—showing it consistently outperforms direct prompting across several LLMs and benchmarks.
The paper introduces TraceTrial-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates the reliability of AI agent harnesses across seven components—context, execution, governance, lifecycle, observability, tools, and verification—using 95 expert-level tasks with executable or state-based ground truth. It employs a Trajectory Tracing module to record agent execution, a two-layer evaluation framework to separately assess agent performance and harness reliability, and a Multi-source Evidence Acquisition module to gather evidence for LLM-based evaluation. The benchmark’s analysis of 3,420 runs across four harnesses and nine models shows harness scores between 59.8% and 72.0%, with 31.1% of runs succeeding despite failing at least one harness criterion, highlighting the need for auditable and reproducible harness evaluation.
arXiv:2606. 31478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous research agents can now draft hypotheses, write code, run experiments, and produce papers, but they remain brittle when experiments fail.
arXiv:2607. 12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Failure attribution for LLM-based agentic systems, i.
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...
arXiv:2609.33676v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents increasingly take consequential actions through interactions with users, policies, and external tools. Auditing these agents requires au...
arXiv:2606. 09071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents now solve complex tasks through long plan-and-execution traces, yet the ability to locate errors in a completed traces still lags far behind, especially in the \emph{silent failure} regime.
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:2608.15242v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In long agent executions, an early error can persist through later actions and checks, while evidence needed to trace its origin is dispersed acros...