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Main Authors: Zhang, Heng, Shi, Yuling, Gu, Xiaodong, You, Haochen, Zhang, Zijian, Gan, Lubin, Yuan, Yilei, Huang, Jin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10581
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author Zhang, Heng
Shi, Yuling
Gu, Xiaodong
You, Haochen
Zhang, Zijian
Gan, Lubin
Yuan, Yilei
Huang, Jin
author_facet Zhang, Heng
Shi, Yuling
Gu, Xiaodong
You, Haochen
Zhang, Zijian
Gan, Lubin
Yuan, Yilei
Huang, Jin
contents Multi-agent systems powered by Large Language Models excel at complex tasks through coordinated collaboration, yet they face high failure rates in multi-turn deep search scenarios. Existing temporal attribution methods struggle to accurately diagnose root causes, particularly when errors propagate across multiple agents. Attempts to automate failure attribution by analyzing action sequences remain ineffective due to their inability to account for information dependencies that span agents. This paper identifies two core challenges: \textit{(i) distinguishing symptoms from root causes in multi-agent error propagation}, and \textit{(ii) tracing information dependencies beyond temporal order}. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{GraphTracer}, a framework that redefines failure attribution through information flow analysis. GraphTracer constructs Information Dependency Graphs (IDGs) to explicitly capture how agents reference and build on prior outputs. It localizes root causes by tracing through these dependency structures instead of relying on temporal sequences. GraphTracer also uses graph-aware synthetic data generation to target critical nodes, creating realistic failure scenarios. Evaluations on the Who\&When benchmark and integration into production systems demonstrate that GraphTracer-8B achieves up to 18.18\% higher attribution accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models and enables 4.8\% to 14.2\% performance improvements in deployed multi-agent frameworks, establishing a robust solution for multi-agent system debugging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GraphTracer: Graph-Guided Failure Tracing in LLM Agents for Robust Multi-Turn Deep Search
Zhang, Heng
Shi, Yuling
Gu, Xiaodong
You, Haochen
Zhang, Zijian
Gan, Lubin
Yuan, Yilei
Huang, Jin
Graphics
Multi-agent systems powered by Large Language Models excel at complex tasks through coordinated collaboration, yet they face high failure rates in multi-turn deep search scenarios. Existing temporal attribution methods struggle to accurately diagnose root causes, particularly when errors propagate across multiple agents. Attempts to automate failure attribution by analyzing action sequences remain ineffective due to their inability to account for information dependencies that span agents. This paper identifies two core challenges: \textit{(i) distinguishing symptoms from root causes in multi-agent error propagation}, and \textit{(ii) tracing information dependencies beyond temporal order}. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{GraphTracer}, a framework that redefines failure attribution through information flow analysis. GraphTracer constructs Information Dependency Graphs (IDGs) to explicitly capture how agents reference and build on prior outputs. It localizes root causes by tracing through these dependency structures instead of relying on temporal sequences. GraphTracer also uses graph-aware synthetic data generation to target critical nodes, creating realistic failure scenarios. Evaluations on the Who\&When benchmark and integration into production systems demonstrate that GraphTracer-8B achieves up to 18.18\% higher attribution accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models and enables 4.8\% to 14.2\% performance improvements in deployed multi-agent frameworks, establishing a robust solution for multi-agent system debugging.
title GraphTracer: Graph-Guided Failure Tracing in LLM Agents for Robust Multi-Turn Deep Search
topic Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10581