通过验证假设定位大模型多智能体系统故障,提升可靠性。
VerifyMAS: Hypothesis Verification for Failure Attribution in LLM Multi-Agent Systems

- 用假设验证替代直接预测,分解故障归因为全局轨迹验证与局部定位。
- 在Aegis-Bench和Who&When上优于现有方法,对Qwen和GPT均有效。
- 支持长轨迹推理,不牺牲效率,适合复杂多智能体系统调试。
基于大语言模型的多智能体系统(LLM-MAS)在处理复杂任务时表现优异,但不可靠的智能体仍是系统可靠性的主要瓶颈。自动故障归因至关重要,但现有方法如直接预测代理-错误对或代理优先归因,依赖局部日志,难以捕捉跨步骤不一致和跨代理协作错误等全局失败模式。直接预测还导致组合搜索空间过大,影响精细归因。为此,我们提出VerifyMAS,一种基于假设验证的故障归因框架。不同于直接预测故障代理与错误类型,VerifyMAS对完整交互轨迹进行假设生成与验证。该验证式方法将归因分解为轨迹级错误验证与细粒度代理定位,实现以错误为核心的归因,同时大幅降低搜索空间。我们引入基于结构化错误分类的假设数据构建策略,并微调专用的LLM验证器模型,用于轨迹级故障验证与代理归因。在Aegis-Bench和Who&When上的实验表明,VerifyMAS能持续提升多种主干模型(包括开源Qwen与API调用的GPT模型),优于先前方法,且不牺牲长轨迹推理效率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model-driven multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) excel at complex tasks, yet unreliable agents remain a key bottleneck to system-level reliability. Automatic failure attribution is therefore critical, but existing approaches, such as direct prediction of agent-error pairs and agent-first failure attribution, rely on local logs of agents and miss global failures that only manifest over full interaction trajectories, such as cross-step inconsistencies and inter-agent coordination errors. Moreover, directly predicting failures induces a large combinatorial search space, hindering fine-grained attribution. To address these challenges, we propose VerifyMAS, a hypothesis verification framework for agent failure attribution. Instead of directly predicting faulty agents and error types, VerifyMAS formulates and verifies failure hypotheses against full trajectories. This verification-based approach decomposes attribution into trajectory-level error validation and fine-grained agent localization, providing an error-first attribution approach that captures global failure patterns while substantially reducing the search space. We further introduce a hypothesis-based data construction strategy grounded in a structured error taxonomy and fine-tune a specialized LLM verifier model for trajectory-level failure verification and agent attribution. Experiments on Aegis-Bench and Who&When show that VerifyMAS consistently improves diverse backbone models, including open-source Qwen and API-based GPT models, outperforming prior methods without sacrificing inference efficiency for long multi-agent trajectories.
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