AgentTrace: Causal Graph Tracing for Root Cause Analysis in Deployed Multi-Agent Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Wang, Zhaohui Geoffrey
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Wang, Zhaohui Geoffrey
author_facet Wang, Zhaohui Geoffrey
contents As multi-agent AI systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings - from automated customer support to DevOps remediation - failures become harder to diagnose due to cascading effects, hidden dependencies, and long execution traces. We present AgentTrace, a lightweight causal tracing framework for post-hoc failure diagnosis in deployed multi-agent workflows. AgentTrace reconstructs causal graphs from execution logs, traces backward from error manifestations, and ranks candidate root causes using interpretable structural and positional signals - without requiring LLM inference at debugging time. Across a diverse benchmark of multi-agent failure scenarios designed to reflect common deployment patterns, AgentTrace localizes root causes with high accuracy and sub-second latency, significantly outperforming both heuristic and LLM-based baselines. Our results suggest that causal tracing provides a practical foundation for improving the reliability and trustworthiness of agentic systems in the wild.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14688
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AgentTrace: Causal Graph Tracing for Root Cause Analysis in Deployed Multi-Agent Systems
Wang, Zhaohui Geoffrey
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
As multi-agent AI systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings - from automated customer support to DevOps remediation - failures become harder to diagnose due to cascading effects, hidden dependencies, and long execution traces. We present AgentTrace, a lightweight causal tracing framework for post-hoc failure diagnosis in deployed multi-agent workflows. AgentTrace reconstructs causal graphs from execution logs, traces backward from error manifestations, and ranks candidate root causes using interpretable structural and positional signals - without requiring LLM inference at debugging time. Across a diverse benchmark of multi-agent failure scenarios designed to reflect common deployment patterns, AgentTrace localizes root causes with high accuracy and sub-second latency, significantly outperforming both heuristic and LLM-based baselines. Our results suggest that causal tracing provides a practical foundation for improving the reliability and trustworthiness of agentic systems in the wild.
title AgentTrace: Causal Graph Tracing for Root Cause Analysis in Deployed Multi-Agent Systems
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14688