Agentic systems entering production typically operate as partially integrated assemblies where structural defects, not task-level errors, dominate the failure landscape. At this maturity level, task-level error detection may be infeasible: structural failure modes mask the signal that task-level monitors are designed to detect.
The paper audits silent failures in agent-to-tool interactions within the ToolUniverse environment, focusing on 15 scientific tools. It identifies 91 failures—primarily missing data or inconsistent search/filtering—occurring mainly in the API and wrapper layers, and shows how these silent failures can propagate downstream into seemingly valid outputs. The authors propose contextual reliability and recommend testing, disclosure, monitoring, and measurement strategies for the agent-tool pipeline.
By Shreya Gopalan, Devansh Singh, Sundaraparipurnan Narayanan
arXiv:2608. 02786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems can fail silently.
By Priyanka Bajaj (Independent Researcher)
arXiv:2605. 08717v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software engineering agents are increasingly deployed in evaluable engineering environments, yet post-failure recovery remains costly, manual, and ad hoc.
By Chenyu Zhao, Shenglin Zhang, Yihang Lin, Wenwei Gu, Zhimin Chen, Yongqian Sun, Dan Pei, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Minghua Ma
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
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.
By Bo Deng, Xinlei Zheng, Yi Wei, Kang Zhou, Chongyang Tao, Renzhao Liang, Xuanren Chen, Lifan Guo, Chi Zhang