针对对话中失败信号稀疏的问题,提出可早预警的智能判断方法。
When Evidence is Sparse: Weakly Supervised Early Failure Alerting in Dialogs and LLM-Agent Trajectories

- 基于注意力机制识别稀疏的失败线索,从部分对话推断风险
- 失败证据仅占对话4.7%-11.3%的回合,平均在80%后才出现
- 无需训练多个触发器,可动态调节预警准确率与及时性
早期失败预警需在对话或智能体轨迹进行中判断其是否可能失败,但监督信号通常仅为整体成功/失败标签,而预警需基于部分交互。现有方法常将终局标签赋予所有前缀,误判每个回合均为失败证据。本文提出两阶段方法:首先通过注意力机制从轨迹标签中学习稀疏的回合级失败证据,构建失败风险评估模型;再结合α-STOP策略,在推理时根据偏好选择准确率与预警时机的平衡点,避免为每种偏好单独训练触发器。在客户支持、任务导向对话、说服、工具使用和规划五个基准上,发现高相关失败证据仅占4.7%-11.3%的对话回合,且平均在59.0%-83.6%的轨迹长度后才首次出现。相比朴素前缀监督,注意力预测器使帕累托前沿质量提升1%-10%;整体系统相较最优触发策略提升3%-42%,同时每种运行点的训练成本降低1-3个数量级。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Early failure alerting requires deciding, while a dialog or agent trajectory is still unfolding, whether to flag it as likely to fail. This is challenging because supervision is typically available only as a trajectory-level success/failure label while alerts must be raised from partial interactions. Prior early-classification methods often bridge this gap by assigning the terminal label to every prefix, treating every turn as failure evidence. We hypothesize that this prefix-label assumption is poorly matched to multi-turn language interactions, where evidence of eventual failure is sparse and often delayed. In this paper, we introduce a two-stage approach that learns from this sparse evidence structure and uses the resulting risk estimates for controllable early alerting. Specifically, our attention-based failure predictor learns sparse turn-level failure evidence from trajectory labels and uses it to estimate failure risk from partial histories. We then pair this predictor with $α$-STOP, a single preference-conditioned stopping policy that selects an accuracy-earliness operating point at inference time rather than training a separate trigger for each preference. Across five benchmarks spanning customer support, task-oriented dialog, persuasion, tool use, and planning, we first show that high-relevance failure evidence occupies only 4.7-11.3% of turns and first appears after 59.0-83.6\% of trajectories on average. We further show that the attention-based predictor improves Pareto-frontier quality (hypervolume) by 1-10\% over naive prefix supervision, and that the full system improves frontier quality by 3-42\% over state-of-the-art trigger policies while reducing training cost per operating point by 1-3 orders of magnitude.
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