AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy tool outputs. We address this gap by manually annotating failed agent runs and release a novel benchmark of 170 trajectories across 11 diverse task settings, including structured API workflows, incident management, and open-ended web/file tasks. Each trajectory is annotated with a critical failure step and a category from a grounded-theory derived, cross-domain failure taxonomy. To mitigate the human cost of failure attribution, we present AgentRx, an textitautomated diagnostic framework that pinpoints the critical failure step in a failed agent trajectory. It synthesizes constraints, evaluates them step-by-step, and produces an auditable validation log of constraint violations with associated evidence; an LLM-based judge uses this log to localize the critical step and category. AgentRx improves step localization by 75% on average over prior work, while providing failure category attribution.
Key facts. Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.
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15 of 28 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 53.
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- 2026Unified Agentic Video Editing Across Levels of Complexity and Creativity11 Sep 2026
- 2026CatchBench: When Can an Agent Failure Be Caught?24 Aug 2026
- 2026LongRCA Bench: Root-Cause Localization in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories15 Aug 2026
- 2026Debugging the Debuggers: Failure-Anchored Structured Recovery for Software Engineering Agents9 May 2026
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