Tracing Agentic Failure from the Flow of Success
Failure attribution for LLM-based agentic systems, i.e., identifying which steps in a failure trajectory caused the task to fail, is critical for debugging and improving these systems. Existing approaches either rely on prompting-based pipelines, which are computationally expensive, or require post-training on failure trajectories with step-level error annotations, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We argue that a practical failure attribution model should be lightweight and trainable without step-level supervision on failure data. To this end, we address unsupervised failure attribution, i.e., training exclusively on successful trajectories and identifying error steps at inference time given a failure trajectory. We propose OAT, which casts this problem as one-class learning with neural controlled differential equations, modeling the dynamical pattern of successful trajectories in latent space. At inference time, each step in a failure trajectory is assigned an anomaly score based on its deviation from the dynamics learned on successful trajectories, which is then used to form a set of error steps. With training on only 100 successful trajectories, experiments show that OAT is 200--5000 times faster than prompting-based baselines, and, at the same time, consistently outperforms them in both in-domain and out-of-distribution datasets with +20% and +7% F1 scores, respectively, demonstrating that OAT is a promising and efficient direction for diagnosing agentic system failures.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
AgentTrace: Causal Graph Tracing for Root Cause Analysis in Deployed Multi-Agent Systems
As multi-agent AI systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings - from automated customer support to DevOps remediation - failures become harder to diagnose due to cascading effects, hidden dependencies, and l…
Demystifying the Lifecycle of Failures in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Workflows
Agentic workflows built on low-code orchestration platforms enable rapid development of multi-agent systems, but they also introduce new and poorly understood failure modes that hinder reliability and maintainability. Un…
Optimizing Agentic Workflows using Meta-tools
Agentic AI enables LLM to dynamically reason, plan, and interact with tools to solve complex tasks. However, agentic workflows often require many iterative reasoning steps and tool invocations, leading to significant ope…
TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories
LLM-based agentic systems have shown remarkable capabilities in complex domains, while suffering from cascading errors and difficulty in debugging. Critical error detection aims to locate the earliest error step in a fai…
Exploring the Semantic Gap in Agentic Data Systems: A Formative Study of Operationalization Failures in Analytical Workflows
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate queries, invoke tools, and construct analytical workflows. Although recent advances have substantially improved workflow generation and execution, the semant…