Localizing Emergent Failures in Agentic AI: Recovering Minimal Repair Families via Counterfactual Replay

Abstract:Failures in agentic AI systems can arise from interactions among messages exchanged by multiple large language model (LLM) agents. Pointwise attribution cannot distinguish a jointly necessary repair from alternative singleton repairs. We formulate Minimal Repair Family Recovery (MRFR): recovering all inclusion-minimal event sets whose counterfactual replay restores task success within a declared size bound. We propose Graph-Constrained Joint Replay (GCJR), which slices failure-relevant events from an execution dependency graph, constructs graph-feasible singleton and pair candidates, and verifies them by replay with paired clean counterparts. For fixed replay outcomes, GCJR is exact within its declared graph domain. On 90 in-scope cases from a 120-DAG controlled benchmark, GCJR achieves 1.000 Family Exact Match while reducing mean replay calls from 56.3 to 25.3 (55.1%) relative to exhaustive search. On a 24-case, four-agent LLM pilot, it again achieves 1.000 Family Exact Match and reduces mean model calls from 21.0 to 10.0 (52.4%); single-event replay misses jointly necessary repairs.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2608.29228 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.29228v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29228 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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