AgentDebugX: An Open-Source Toolkit for Failure Observability, Attribution, and Recovery in LLM Agents
Authors: Kunlun Zhu, Xuyan Ye, Zhiguang Han, Yuchen Zhao, Bingxuan Li, Weijia Zhang, Muxin Tian, Xiangru Tang, +4 more
Organizations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · University of Toronto · Google · Stanford University
Abstract
LLM agent failures are difficult to debug because the step where an error surfaces is often not the one that caused it. Existing observability tools replay execution traces but provide little support for identifying the root cause or translating diagnosis into recovery. We present AgentDebugX, an open-source debugging framework that organizes debugging as a closed loop of Detect, Attribute, Recover, and Rerun. At its core, DeepDebug performs multi-turn root-cause diagnosis through global trajectory understanding, structure-guided investigation, and cross-examination. On the Who and When benchmark, DeepDebug achieves the best strict attribution accuracy among the evaluated methods on both tested open-weight backbones, reaching 28.8 percent exact agent-and-step accuracy on qwen3.5-9b versus 21.7 percent for the strongest single-pass baseline. On GAIA, DeepDebug repairs 13 of 73 failed tasks in a single rerun, compared with 4 to 6 for three decoupled self-correction baselines, improving overall accuracy from 55.8 percent to 63.6 percent. AgentDebugX exposes this workflow through a Python library, CLI, web console, and installable agentic skill, and provides an opt-in Error Hub for sharing scrubbed failure-diagnosis-repair bundles and reusing them as debugging memory.
LLM-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks through long trajectories involving reasoning steps, tool calls, and inter-agent communication. However, when these agents fail, it is often unclear which agent caused the failure and which step introduced the decisive error. This attribution problem is challenging because mistakes can propagate across the trajectory: later actions may appear incorrect, but only because they depend on an earlier corrupted state. Therefore, failure attribution cannot be treated as independent step-level classification. We propose FALAT, a diagnostic framework for failure attribution in LLM agent trajectories. FALAT frames attribution as a dependency-guided search problem. It first constructs an expectation of how the task should be solved and uses this expectation to identify suspicious regions in the trajectory. It then traces dependencies among decisions, tool outputs, and agent messages to distinguish error-introducing steps from steps that merely inherit or propagate prior mistakes. Finally, FALAT evaluates whether correcting a candidate step would be sufficient to recover the expected outcome, allowing it to identify both the responsible agent and the decisive failure step. We evaluate FALAT on the Who&When benchmark, which includes both algorithm-generated and hand-crafted multi-agent failure trajectories. The results show that FALAT consistently improves responsible-agent and decisive-step attribution. Its best configurations achieve 46.0% step-level accuracy on algorithm-generated trajectories and 29.1% on the more challenging hand-crafted trajectories, outperforming specialized attribution baselines and direct prompting with standalone LLMs. These findings suggest that dependency-aware reasoning is essential for reliable failure diagnosis in LLM agent systems.
AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy tool outputs. We address this gap by manually annotating failed agent runs and release a novel benchmark of 170 trajectories across 11 diverse task settings, including structured API workflows, incident management, and open-ended web/file tasks. Each trajectory is annotated with a critical failure step and a category from a grounded-theory derived, cross-domain failure taxonomy. To mitigate the human cost of failure attribution, we present AgentRx, an automated diagnostic framework that pinpoints the critical failure step in a failed agent trajectory. It synthesizes constraints, evaluates them step-by-step, and produces an auditable validation log of constraint violations with associated evidence; an LLM-based judge uses this log to localize the critical step and category. AgentRx improves step localization by 75% on average over prior work, while providing failure category attribution.
Large language model (LLM) agents now solve complex tasks through long plan-and-execution traces, yet the ability to locate errors in a completed traces still lags far behind, especially in the \emph{silent failure} regime. Existing approaches predict suspect steps via classifiers or LLM judges, or recover correct answers via retry, but none feed the intervention outcome back to \emph{refine the attribution itself}. We propose \methodname, a method that closes this gap by diagnosing a candidate error step, testing it through controlled replay with a diagnosis-specific patch, and using the verified outcome flip as contrastive evidence to refine the final attribution. Across four localization benchmarks spanning multi-hop reasoning across domains, \methodname achieves the highest localization accuracy among same-auditor methods across all four benchmarks, with the largest gains on structured tool-use traces, while providing actionable localization even when ground-truth answers are unavailable.
Xiaofeng Lin, Yingxu Wang, Tung Sum Thomas Kwok +4