arXiv:2607. 16387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An agent system's execution traces record how it fails, and procedures that improve such a system without changing model weights (trajectory selection, prompt and workflow optimization, runtime monitoring) read these traces for feedback.
By Mert Cemri, Andrei Cojocaru, Melissa Pan, Shu Liu, Shubham Agarwal, Alexander Krentsel, Jay Tang, Kannan Ramchandran, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Matei Zaharia, Alex Dimakis, Ion Stoica
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts.
The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.
By Salman Rahman, Yubin Kim, Mihir Parmar, A. Ali Heydari, Genglin Liu, Simon A. Lee, Weizhi Zhang, Arian Hosseini, Ahmed A. Metwally, Yuzhe Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Xin Liu, Pavel Izmailov, Saadia Gabriel, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Hamid Palangi
arXiv:2608.25920v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MASs) are increasingly applied to long-horizon complex tasks, their reliability has emerge...
By Zhongwen Luan, Xiaoyu Zhang, Ming Hu, Yue Yang, Jiongchi Yu, Xiaohong Chen
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...
By Shraddha Barke, Arnav Goyal, Alind Khare, Avaljot Singh, Suman Nath, Chetan Bansal
The paper introduces Growing Harness, a training method that transforms recurring control logic in large language model agents into reusable executable code, reducing reliance on the model for task-specific decisions. By using strategy-free scaffolds, failure-guided code repair, and success-first gating, the approach learns a shared harness that improves performance across multiple benchmarks and model sizes. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus and WebArena-Verified show significant gains in success rates and substantial reductions in LLM calls and inference cost compared to traditional tool‑calling agents.
By Laizhen Li, Jiarui Li, Juanjuan Zhao, Kejiang Ye, Ye Li, Cheng-zhong Xu, Xitong Gao