[2603.25001] Rethinking Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems: A Multi-Perspective Benchmark and Evaluation

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.25001 (cs) [Submitted on 26 Mar 2026] Title:Rethinking Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems: A Multi-Perspective Benchmark and Evaluation Authors:Yeonjun In, Mehrab Tanjim, Jayakumar Subramanian, Sungchul Kim, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Wonjoong Kim, Sangwu Park, Somdeb Sarkhel, Chanyoung Park View a PDF of the paper titled Rethinking Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems: A Multi-Perspective Benchmark and Evaluation, by Yeonjun In and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Failure attribution is essential for diagnosing and improving multi-agent systems (MAS), yet existing benchmarks and methods largely assume a single deterministic root cause for each failure. In practice, MAS failures often admit multiple plausible attributions due to complex inter-agent dependencies and ambiguous execution trajectories. We revisit MAS failure attribution from a multi-perspective standpoint and propose multi-perspective failure attribution, a practical paradigm that explicitly accounts for attribution ambiguity. To support this setting, we introduce MP-Bench, the first benchmark designed for multi-perspective failure attribution in MAS, along with a new evaluation protocol tailored to this paradigm. Through extensive experiments, we find that prior conclusions suggesting LLMs struggle with failure attribution are largely driven by limitations in existing benchmark designs. Our results highlight the necessity of m...