arXiv:2509.10401cs.AIcs.CL2025-09被引 10

用因果推理提升多智能体系统故障定位准确率。

Abduct, Act, Predict: Scaffolding Causal Inference for Automated Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems

  • 三步框架:推断根因、设计修正动作、预测结果验证
  • 算法生成数据上准确率达47.46%,提升2.85倍
  • 适合需要可验证故障分析的复杂系统开发者

多智能体系统中的故障归因——精确定位导致任务失败的关键步骤——是一个关键但未解决的挑战。现有方法将此视为对长对话日志的模式识别任务,导致步骤级准确率低于17%,难以用于调试复杂系统。其核心缺陷在于缺乏稳健的反事实推理能力:无法判断纠正单一动作是否真能避免失败。为弥合这一反事实推理差距,我们提出Abduct-Act-Predict(A2P)框架,将故障归因从模式识别转变为结构化因果推理任务。A2P在单次推理中引导大语言模型经历三个正式步骤:(1) 推断动作背后的隐含根因;(2) 定义最小修正干预;(3) 模拟后续轨迹并验证干预是否解决失败。该方法结合全对话上下文,同时施加严格的因果逻辑。在Who&When基准上的实验表明,算法生成数据集上准确率达47.46%,是基线16.67%的2.85倍;手写构造数据集上达29.31%,是基线12.07%的2.43倍。通过因果视角重构问题,A2P提供了更鲁棒、可验证且显著更准确的自动化故障归因方案。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Failure attribution in multi-agent systems -- pinpointing the exact step where a decisive error occurs -- is a critical yet unsolved challenge. Current methods treat this as a pattern recognition task over long conversation logs, leading to critically low step-level accuracy (below 17\%), which renders them impractical for debugging complex systems. Their core weakness is a fundamental inability to perform robust counterfactual reasoning: to determine if correcting a single action would have actually averted the task failure. To bridge this \emph{counterfactual inference gap}, we introduce Abduct-Act-Predict (A2P) Scaffolding, a novel agent framework that transforms failure attribution from pattern recognition into a structured causal inference task. A2P explicitly guides a large language model through a formal three-step reasoning process within a single inference pass: (1) Abduction, to infer the hidden root causes behind an agent's actions; (2) Action, to define a minimal corrective intervention; and (3) Prediction, to simulate the subsequent trajectory and verify if the intervention resolves the failure. This structured approach leverages the holistic context of the entire conversation while imposing a rigorous causal logic on the model's analysis. Our extensive experiments on the Who\&When benchmark demonstrate its efficacy. On the Algorithm-Generated dataset, A2P achieves 47.46\% step-level accuracy, a 2.85$\times$ improvement over the 16.67\% of the baseline. On the more complex Hand-Crafted dataset, it achieves 29.31\% step accuracy, a 2.43$\times$ improvement over the baseline's 12.07\%. By reframing the problem through a causal lens, A2P Scaffolding provides a robust, verifiable, and significantly more accurate solution for automated failure attribution. Ours code are released at https://github.com/ResearAI/A2P.

故障归因因果推理多智能体

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。