# Fantastic Adaptive Taxonomies and How to Use Them

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16387 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16387/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13131/) (2025)
- [Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13657/) (2025)
- [Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11868/) (2026)
- [Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16797/) (2023)
- [GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19457/) (2025)
- [Generative Verifiers: Reward Modeling as Next-Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15240/) (2024)
- [AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10762/) (2024)
- [Automated Design of Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08435/) (2024)
- [TextGrad: Automatic "Differentiation" via Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07496/) (2024)
- [TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12524/) (2023)
- [Which Agent Causes Task Failures and When? On Automated Failure Attribution of LLM Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00212/) (2025)
- [Domino: Discovering Systematic Errors with Cross-Modal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14960/) (2022)
- [LLM Critics Help Catch LLM Bugs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00215/) (2024)
- [EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14228/) (2024)
- [TRAIL: Trace Reasoning and Agentic Issue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08638/) (2025)
- [Trace is the Next AutoDiff: Generative Optimization with Rich Feedback, Execution Traces, and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16218/) (2024)
- [AdaEvolve: Adaptive LLM Driven Zeroth-Order Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20133/) (2026)
- [EvoX: Meta-Evolution for Automated Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23413/) (2026)
- [Measuring Agents in Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04123/) (2025)
- [LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05391/) (2026)
- [What Is Your Agent's GPA? A Framework for Evaluating Agent Goal-Plan-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08847/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Maintaining Benchmarks Against Increasingly Capable Agents: Detection and Remediation of Unearned Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34262/) (2026)
- [Agent Error Dataset: Scaling 50,000 Error--Diagnosis Pairs for Failure Analysis and Error-Aware Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40111/) (2026)
- [Vestrum: Improving Agent Harnesses by Adapting Their Verification, Structure and Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33822/) (2026)
- [GUI-HARVEST: Self-Improving GUI Agents through Evidence-Driven Harness Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00948/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An agent system's execution traces record how it fails, and procedures that improve such a system without changing model weights (trajectory selection, prompt and workflow optimization, runtime monitoring) read these traces for feedback. Yet raw traces are a poor medium for accumulating that feedback: long, instance-specific, and lacking a stable vocabulary for recurring failures. We argue that an agent system should instead maintain an explicit representation of how it fails, induced from its own behavior and reusable wherever failure feedback is needed. AdaMAST builds this representation by converting a target system's traces into a compact, evidence-grounded failure taxonomy: named failure codes organized along three fixed axes (system-level, role-specific, and domain-specific), with every name, definition, and evidence pattern induced from the traces; no code is hand-authored, no trace human-annotated. The taxonomy is not merely a post-hoc diagnostic but a shared feedback interface, improving agents in three ways. In agent-system search, taxonomy-coded diagnoses of failed candidates outperform free-form reflection on all five benchmarks we test. At runtime, taxonomy feedback raises SWE-agent's resolution on SWE-bench Verified Mini from 60% with free-text reflection to 70%, and improves Claude Code from 64.0% to 70.7% as a runtime skill. In trajectory selection, AdaMAST-Judge, a verifier built on the induced codes, improves best-of-5 accuracy on Terminal-Bench 2.0 by 8-15 points over Pass@1. The vocabulary itself is compact (an order-of-magnitude compression that preserves trace distinctions), human-faithful (matching expert failure annotations more closely than a hand-crafted reference vocabulary), and adaptive (taxonomies induced for different domains share few codes). Adaptive failure taxonomies close the loop between the traces agents produce and the procedures that improve them.