{"id":1161825,"date":"2026-02-10T15:45:01","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T23:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1161825"},"modified":"2026-03-11T17:53:46","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T00:53:46","slug":"agentrx-diagnosing-ai-agent-failures-from-execution-trajectories","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/agentrx-diagnosing-ai-agent-failures-from-execution-trajectories\/","title":{"rendered":"AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 115 failed trajectories spanning 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 domain-agnostic 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. Our framework improves step localization and failure attribution over existing baselines across three domains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 115 failed trajectories spanning structured API workflows, incident management, and open-ended web\/file tasks. Each trajectory is 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