Scope Delineation Before Localization: A Two-Stage Framework for Enhancing Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract Large language models (LLMs) are seeing growing adoption in multi-agent systems. In these systems, efficient failure attribution is critical for ensuring robustness and interpretability. Current LLM-based attribution methods often face challenges with lengthy logs and lacking expert knowledge. Drawing inspiration from human debugging strategies, we propose an automated failure attribution framework, Scope Delineation Before Localization, which operates in two key stages: (1) identifying the failure scope and (2) pinpointing the failure step. By decoupling failure attribution into the two stages, our approach alleviates the reasoning workload of LLMs, enabling more precise failure attribution. To support scope delineation, we further introduce two strategies: Stepwise Scope Delineation and Expertise-Assisted Scope Delineation. Experiments on the Who&When dataset validate the efficacy of our two-stage framework, demonstrating substantial improvements over prior methods (up to 24.27% on step-level accuracy).