ASCon: A Direction-Aware Reciprocal Agent--Step Contextualization Model for Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems

Failure attribution in LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) aims to answer who caused failures, when they occurred, and why by identifying responsible targets including faulty agents, erroneous steps, and failure modes. Existing methods have primarily focused on developing dedicated models for specific attribution targets, with limited attention to the evidential dependencies among them. Despite these attribution targets are different, they rely on common diagnostic evidence from MAS trajectories, including task constraints, agent roles, behavioral histories and inter-agent interactions. This commonality motivates us to develop a unified representation model that aggregates the trajectory evidence into individual agent and step representations, which can subsequently be adapted to different attribution targets. Accordingly, we propose ASCon, a direction-aware reciprocal Agent--Step Contextualization model for multiple failure attribution targets. ASCon introduces direction-aware graph attention to model execution context, masked step-to-agent attention to construct behavior-aware agent representations, and agent-conditioned step contextualization to incorporate agent context back into step representations. The resulting contextualized representations enable different attribution targets through lightweight target-specific heads. Experiments show that ASCon can improve faulty-agent detection by 5.83%+ in micro-accuracy, faulty-step detection by 10.63%+ in micro-accuracy, and failure-mode detection by 14.73%+ in Macro-F1. Meanwhile, it can also substantially enhance the LLM-based methods' attribution capabilities in out-of-domain scenarios.