通过依赖追踪定位大模型代理失败的根源步骤和责任人。
FALAT: Tracing Failures in LLM Agent Trajectories via Dependency-Guided Search

- 构建任务预期路径,识别可疑轨迹区域。
- 追踪决策与工具输出间的依赖关系,区分错误源头与传播节点。
- 验证修复候选步骤能否恢复预期结果,精准定位失败关键点。
基于大模型的智能体通过包含推理、工具调用和跨代理通信的长轨迹解决复杂任务。然而,当失败发生时,往往难以判断是哪个代理导致问题,以及哪一步引入了决定性错误。这种归因难题源于错误在轨迹中传播:后续动作看似错误,实则因依赖早期受损状态所致。因此,失败归因不能简单视为独立的步骤分类。本文提出FALAT,一种面向大模型智能体轨迹的故障归因诊断框架。FALAT将归因建模为依赖引导的搜索问题:首先构建任务应有解的预期路径,识别轨迹中的可疑区域;接着追踪决策、工具输出与代理消息之间的依赖关系,区分引入错误的步骤与仅继承或传播错误的步骤;最后评估修正候选步骤是否足以恢复预期结果,从而定位责任代理与决定性失败步骤。我们在Who&When基准上进行评估,该基准包含算法生成和人工设计的多智能体失败轨迹。结果显示,FALAT在算法生成轨迹上达到46.0%的步骤级准确率,在更具挑战性的手写轨迹上达29.1%,优于专用归因基线和直接提示的独立大模型。这表明依赖感知推理对大模型智能体系统的可靠故障诊断至关重要。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLM-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks through long trajectories involving reasoning steps, tool calls, and inter-agent communication. However, when these agents fail, it is often unclear which agent caused the failure and which step introduced the decisive error. This attribution problem is challenging because mistakes can propagate across the trajectory: later actions may appear incorrect, but only because they depend on an earlier corrupted state. Therefore, failure attribution cannot be treated as independent step-level classification. We propose FALAT, a diagnostic framework for failure attribution in LLM agent trajectories. FALAT frames attribution as a dependency-guided search problem. It first constructs an expectation of how the task should be solved and uses this expectation to identify suspicious regions in the trajectory. It then traces dependencies among decisions, tool outputs, and agent messages to distinguish error-introducing steps from steps that merely inherit or propagate prior mistakes. Finally, FALAT evaluates whether correcting a candidate step would be sufficient to recover the expected outcome, allowing it to identify both the responsible agent and the decisive failure step. We evaluate FALAT on the Who&When benchmark, which includes both algorithm-generated and hand-crafted multi-agent failure trajectories. The results show that FALAT consistently improves responsible-agent and decisive-step attribution. Its best configurations achieve 46.0% step-level accuracy on algorithm-generated trajectories and 29.1% on the more challenging hand-crafted trajectories, outperforming specialized attribution baselines and direct prompting with standalone LLMs. These findings suggest that dependency-aware reasoning is essential for reliable failure diagnosis in LLM agent systems.
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。