mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Insights Generator: Systematic Corpus-Level Trace Diagnostics for LLM Agents

arXiv 2605.21347 ↗First posted 20 May 2026cs.AI cs.LG cs.SEcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Diagnosing failures in LLM agents remains largely manual. Practitioners inspect a small subset of execution traces, form ad-hoc hypotheses, and iterate. This process misses patterns that only emerge across trace populations and does not scale to production corpora where individual traces span tens of thousands of tokens. We formalize the problem of corpus-level trace diagnostics. Given a corpus of execution traces, the goal is to produce grounded natural-language insights that characterize systematic behavioral patterns across trace groups, each linked to supporting evidence. We present the Insights Generator (IG), a multi-agent system that answers diagnostic questions by proposing and testing hypotheses across the trace corpus to produce an evidence-backed insights report. We evaluate IG across qualitative and objective dimensions, spanning rubric-based report assessment and downstream performance improvements achieved by implementing IG insights. Human experts using IG reports improve scaffold performance by 30.4 pp over the unmodified baseline scaffold, and coding agents leveraging IG-derived insights show consistent and stable gains. Across benchmarks, IG's scout-investigator architecture produces findings comparable in detection coverage to competing approaches, while domain experts rated IG reports as leading depth and evidence quality.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 24 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.

Builds on

24 of 29 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026VeRO: A Harness for Agents to Optimize Agents25 Feb
  2. 2026Wink: Recovering from Misbehaviors in Coding Agents19 Feb
  3. 2026FeatureBench: Benchmarking Agentic Coding for Complex Feature Development11 Feb
  4. 2026AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories2 Feb
  5. 2025DoVer: Intervention-Driven Auto Debugging for LLM Multi-Agent Systems7 Dec
  6. 2025Where LLM Agents Fail and How They can Learn From Failures29 Sep
  7. 2025Demystifying the Lifecycle of Failures in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Workflows28 Sep
  8. 2025AgenTracer: Who Is Inducing Failure in the LLM Agentic Systems?3 Sep
  9. 2025TRAIL: Trace Reasoning and Agentic Issue Localization13 May
  10. 2025Which Agent Causes Task Failures and When? On Automated Failure Attribution of LLM Multi-Agent Systems30 Apr
  11. 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?17 Mar
  12. 2024AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation14 Oct

Other references · 12

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  2. 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,270
  3. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  4. 2025Humanity's Last Examcited by 467
  5. 2024Automated Design of Agentic Systemscited by 360
  6. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
  7. 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 248
  8. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skillscited by 161
  9. 2024SpreadsheetBench: Towards Challenging Real World Spreadsheet Manipulationcited by 100
  10. 2025Oolong: Evaluating Long Context Reasoning and Aggregation Capabilitiescited by 33
  11. 2026APEX-Agentscited by 29
  12. 2024Holistic Reasoning with Long-Context LMs: A Benchmark for Database Operations on Massive Textual Datacited by 11

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026TraceSIR: A Multi-Agent Framework for Structured Analysis and Reporting of Agentic Execution Traces
  2. 2026TraceCompiler: Skill-Guided Mining and Compilation of LLM Agent Traces into Mostly Deterministic Workflows
  3. 2026PrefixGuard: From LLM-Agent Traces to Online Failure-Warning Monitors
  4. 2026TraceLab: Characterizing Coding Agent Workloads for LLM Serving
  5. 2025Illuminating LLM Coding Agents: Visual Analytics for Deeper Understanding and Enhancement
  6. 2026Automata from Agent Traces: Failure and Next-Step Prediction
  7. 2026From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents
  8. 2026Time to REFLECT: Can We Trust LLM Judges for Evidence-based Research Agents?