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Computation and Language (cs.CL) · 2608.18575 · 2026/08/19

Beyond LLM-Based Reasoning: Lightweight GNNs for Agent Failure Attribution

Li, Ting-Wei, Bei, Yuanchen, Lin, Xiao, Tong, Hanghang
TL;DR:多 agent 失败归因不必靠 LLM:AFANet 用轻量 GNN 建模轨迹语义信号与 agent 关系,近零推理成本匹配或超越 LLM 基线。

🎯 问题

LLM 多 agent 系统失败模式复杂,需定位故障 agent 与错误类型;现有方案依赖 LLM(提示/微调/agentic 流水线),长上下文推理开销大,且即便 SOTA 模型精度也有限——纯规模扩张不够。

🔬 方法

AFANet:图框架,用 step 级语义信号与 agent 级关系建模交互轨迹,步/agent 双层级图结构 + 近零成本推理,可加廉价 test-time 自适应。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
1 Introduction
2 Preliminaries
3 Methodology
4 Experiment
5 Related Work
6 Conclusion

📊 结果

显著更少参数、近零推理成本下,在域内基准匹配或超越包括微调模型在内的 LLM 基线;跨不同 GNN 架构稳健。

💡 与研究方向关联

「归因不一定要生成式推理」——用结构信号替代昂贵 LLM 判断,与用户关注的推理基础设施/效率方向一致。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) often exhibit complex failure modes, which frequently cause agents to produce incorrect outcomes. This motivates the task of Agent Failure Attribution: given a failed multi-agent trajectory, identify the faulty agents and their corresponding error types. Existing approaches predominantly rely on LLMs to perform failure attribution, either through direct prompting, fine-tuning on synthetic data or complex agentic pipelines. While effective, these methods incur substantial computational overhead due to long-context processing, expensive post-training and handcrafted workflows. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that even state-of-the-art models achieve limited accuracy on existing benchmarks, suggesting that scaling model size alone is insufficient. In this work, we revisit this task and question the necessity of such expensive generative solutions. We introduce AFANet, a lightweight graph-based framework that models interaction trajectories through step-level semantic signals and agent-level relationships. We show that with significantly fewer parameters and near-zero inference cost, AFANet (i) matches or outperforms LLM-based baselines, including fine-tuned models on in-domain benchmarks, (ii) maintains robust performance across different GNN architectures and (iii) can be further improved with inexpensive test-time adaptation on the OOD benchmark. Our results suggest that effective agent failure attribution does not require heavy LLM reasoning and a lightweight, structured approach can achieve strong performance.
Deep Read · 2026-08-21高松灯 / Agent 日报
Agent Failure AttributionGNNLightweightMulti-Agent