arXiv AI By Sarath Shekkizhar, Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Jiayu Wang, Srijan Bansal, Trong Huy Nguyen, Dingfeng Jiang, Dongqi Liu, Ruochen Zhao, Wei Lu, Giuseppe Carenini, Mohit Bansal, Silvio Savarese, Shafiq Joty

Why Do Agent Teams Fail Across Boundaries? A Failure Taxonomy for Agent-to-Agent Systems with Private States

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The paper presents a taxonomy of 20 failure modes—called $A^2$-Failures—in agent-to-agent (A2A) systems where agents operate for different principals and have private states. Analyzing over 2,500 runs across 488 scenarios, the authors identify four categories of failures: discovery and delegation, grounding and record consistency, verification, and conduct and fidelity. Key findings include that task phrasing drives interaction, agents rarely verify peers’ claims, and overall success metrics obscure underlying coordination and verification issues.

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