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