arXiv Machine Learning By Do Nguyen-Thanh, Junlin Fang, Bing Li, Zhen Fang, Sean Du

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

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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.

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