Pith. sign in

hub Canonical reference

TRAIL: Trace Reasoning and Agentic Issue Localization

Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

24 Pith papers citing it
Background 83% of classified citations
abstract

The increasing adoption of agentic workflows across diverse domains brings a critical need to scalably and systematically evaluate the complex traces these systems generate. Current evaluation methods depend on manual, domain-specific human analysis of lengthy workflow traces - an approach that does not scale with the growing complexity and volume of agentic outputs. Error analysis in these settings is further complicated by the interplay of external tool outputs and language model reasoning, making it more challenging than traditional software debugging. In this work, we (1) articulate the need for robust and dynamic evaluation methods for agentic workflow traces, (2) introduce a formal taxonomy of error types encountered in agentic systems, and (3) present a set of 148 large human-annotated traces (TRAIL) constructed using this taxonomy and grounded in established agentic benchmarks. To ensure ecological validity, we curate traces from both single and multi-agent systems, focusing on real-world applications such as software engineering and open-world information retrieval. Our evaluations reveal that modern long context LLMs perform poorly at trace debugging, with the best Gemini-2.5-pro model scoring a mere 11% on TRAIL. Our dataset and code are made publicly available to support and accelerate future research in scalable evaluation for agentic workflows.

hub tools

citation-role summary

background 5 baseline 1

citation-polarity summary

years

2026 22 2025 2

representative citing papers

Counsel: A Meta-Evaluation Dataset for Agentic Tasks

cs.AI · 2026-06-19 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Counsel is a new dataset of LLM-generated process critiques on agent benchmarks paired with human labels on error location and reasoning quality, achieving 0.78 Krippendorff alpha.

Holistic Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis of AI Agents

cs.AI · 2026-05-14 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

A span-decomposed evaluation framework for AI agents achieves state-of-the-art results on GAIA and SWE-Bench with up to 3.5x gains in localization accuracy by breaking traces into independent per-span judgments.

Process-Centric Analysis of Agentic Software Systems

cs.SE · 2025-12-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Graphectory turns stochastic agent trajectories into analyzable graphs, showing that stronger models and successful fixes follow coherent localization-validation steps while failures are chaotic, and online detection plus rollback improves resolution rates by 6.9-23.5%.

Towards Self-Improving Error Diagnosis in Multi-Agent Systems

cs.MA · 2026-04-19 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

ErrorProbe introduces a self-improving pipeline for attributing semantic failures in LLM multi-agent systems to specific agents and steps via anomaly detection, backward tracing, and tool-grounded validation with verified episodic memory.

A pragmatic approach to regulating AI agents

cs.CY · 2026-04-16 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

AI agents require distinct regulation as AI systems under the EU AI Act with orchestration-layer oversight and a risk-based traffic light authorization system in contract law to preserve human accountability.

A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models

cs.CL · 2025-07-17 · accept · novelty 4.0

The survey organizes Context Engineering into retrieval, processing, management, and integrated systems like RAG and multi-agent setups while identifying an asymmetry where LLMs handle complex inputs well but struggle with equally sophisticated long outputs.

citing papers explorer

Showing 24 of 24 citing papers.