Large language model agents reason, call tools, and act autonomously over many steps, but their agentic skills-correctly sequencing tools, planning under dependencies, judging untrusted inputs, and grounding generated arguments-are hard to measure with accuracy-only leaderboards. We present BekchiAI, which addresses both sides: a benchmark for measuring agentic skill and a platform for observing and controlling live agents. The BekchiAI-Benchmark, a suite of 13 tool-using ReAct agents across 7 task categories (arithmetic, structured/SQL, security detection, URL grounding, planning, orchestration, and tool-policy), totalling 2,057 deterministic, committed test tasks. Every task is verifier-checkable gold answers are computed by running canonical SQL against a real database, computing the exact schedule of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), or evaluating closed-form lambdas including adversarial security samples paired with deliberately imperfect signature scanners so a score reflects the model's own judgment, not the copying of an oracle. We define a small set of behavioral metrics beyond accuracy-tool-call adherence, URL hallucination and source-match, and per-model token cost and report a four-model comparison (Qwen3.7-Max, gemma-4-31B-it, gemma4:26b, gpt-oss-120b) whose story is in the per-family spread, not the aggregate. The benchmark runs are executed using the provided evaluation scripts. BekchiAI-Platform is a complementary web-based observability and control layer for deployed agents, providing full token and latency telemetry as well as remote run termination. The benchmark, evaluation tools, and platform are publicly released.
Large language model (LLM) agents can now carry out long-horizon technical workflows involving complex tool use, code execution, file edits, and generated artifacts. As agents do more work faster, the productivity bottleneck shifts from producing outputs to auditing whether those outputs are correct and trustworthy. Agent observability systems make fine-grained execution events visible, but visibility alone still leaves reviewers to reconstruct which actions, artifacts, and validation steps matter for a particular conclusion. We introduce LEDGER - Layered Evidence and Decision Graphs for Execution Review, a tracing and review system that builds layered trace graphs over observed agent sessions. LEDGER preserves Trace Records while grouping them into Evidence Nodes and Workflow Nodes, representing artifacts as evidence anchors, and adding typed semantic edges that connect claims to supporting actions, artifacts, and checks. Through data-analysis and coding examples, we show how the resulting traces expose workflow decisions, artifact lineage, repair steps, validation coverage, and claim-support paths for evidence-centered audit.
Dimitrios Pylorof, Humberto E. Garciaeess.SY cs.LG math.OC
What should a machine learning model learn when data is missing during training? We look at the learning process from a dynamical systems perspective, cast data missingness as a structured loss of actuation that limits controllability of the parameter error dynamics, and ultimately derive adaptation mechanisms with Lyapunov stability characteristics that throttle model updates in ways that preserve learning coherence under partial, intermittent observability. Under recurrent excitation, our analysis provides ISS-type residual-to-state bounds with respect to a bounded closed-loop mismatch between the loss residual and the preconditioned update geometry. We evaluate the efficacy of our directional observability-aware adaptive learning approach on multimodal contexts, reinforcing its premise in promoting learning coherence and stability even in pathologically sparse domains and problems.
Many modern AI systems analyze conversational traces to infer aspects of human interaction and state, implicitly assuming that such information is recoverable from conversation. We study observability: whether a target is recoverable from conversational transcripts alone. Observability is difficult to assess because transcripts may provide only a partial view of many targets, and large-scale analysis requires model-based annotation, making true limits of the conversational signal hard to distinguish from annotator error. We therefore study clinical encounters, where patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide an external anchor for patient state, and visits follow broadly structured patterns. We study observability of patient state and conversational phase structure using 439 real-world clinical encounter transcripts spanning 134 hours, including 245 ENT transcripts paired with 273 PROM surveys. We operationalize patient state using PROM scores for voice, cough, and swallowing; phase structure using conversational phase segmentation. To make these analyses credible at scale, we use a PHI-compliant GPT-5 deployment for transcript annotation and conduct 40 hours of manual validation, reducing the risk that apparent limits of observability simply reflect annotator error. Our core finding is an observability asymmetry: phase structure is observable and useful for characterizing clinical encounter organization, while patient state is only partially observable, even in a setting designed to elicit patient symptoms and experiences, cautioning against transcript-only inference of human state.
Agent Skills package reusable instructions and assets for tool-using language-model agents. Progressive loading creates failure boundaries poorly represented by session-, model-, or tool-centric traces: a Skill can be discovered but not activated, activated without instructions, or appear successful without an independently verified outcome. We present Skill Runtime Intelligence, a passive runtime-intelligence system that reconstructs supported Skill-lifecycle stages across heterogeneous harnesses while preserving unsupported stages as unknown. Its Run Panorama separates immutable events, deterministic relations, inferred diagnoses, and controlled outcomes with four evidence grades; optional trace import and OTLP/HTTP export support existing observability deployments. Across six frozen repository profiles, three coding agents, and seven clean or fault-injected conditions, all 126 executions preserve source worktrees and each correlates to exactly one source session. Yet adapters expose three distinct semantics: no Skill runs; complete runs but no failure-like events; or failure-like events in every operational-failure and clean session. In a seven-template diagnostic study, semantic aliases and Panorama localize the same six non-clean boundaries but differ in exact/status behavior; both Raw views emit a failure status on all 18 clean cases, while Panorama emits none. A known-rule graph conforms to 126/126 frozen contracts, whereas a second model completes only 228/378 calls. These observations motivate executable adapter qualification and show that event presence is not boundary fidelity, composite exact scores mask distinct errors, and model explanations must not overwrite deterministic facts.
Andres Algaba, Francesca Carlon, Lynn Delcon +3cs.LG cs.AI
Large language models often show users a final response and a short reasoning summary while the full reasoning trace stays hidden. We introduce an observability ladder that holds each completed run fixed and varies only what a reader inspects to judge whether the answer is correct: the response, a self-summary the model writes from the trace, the trace itself, and internal signals, each with and without the prompt. Across three benchmarks and five open-weight Qwen3 and gpt-oss models, we train matched linear correctness predictors on each access level. Without the prompt, summaries carry most of the trace's ranking signal (mean AUROC 0.774 versus 0.813) and add +0.156 over the response alone. With the prompt visible, the summary's gain collapses to +0.019, while the trace still adds +0.041. Even at equal length, the trace's last words predict correctness as well as summaries, or slightly better, and carry denser and more discriminative uncertainty and self-correction cues. On MMLU-Pro questions with both correct and incorrect runs, linear summary readers are near chance and trace readers retain only modest signal, both with and without the prompt (prompt-withheld AUROC 0.503-0.545 versus 0.544-0.590). With the prompt withheld, a GPT-5-mini reader recovers substantially more signal from both summaries and traces on gpt-oss-20b, and even then the trace keeps a small +0.034 advantage. Much of the linear readers' trace signal is associated with length. In the common case where users already hold the prompt, summaries are less helpful than the full trace for monitoring correctness. Monitorability is thus a joint property of the display and the reader, so any monitorability claim, including for faithfulness, should specify both.
Autonomous agents are increasingly used to execute consequential tasks in environments governed by operational constraints, organizational policies, regulatory requirements, and technical standards. Their safety is therefore determined not by the correctness of individual actions, but by whether their overall behavior remains consistent with the rules and invariants of the systems in which they operate. As large language model (LLM)-based agents become more autonomous and increasingly delegate tasks across organizational boundaries, securing them evolves from a single challenge into a broad and interconnected landscape spanning the entire agentic stack. At the single-agent level, untrusted inputs through prompts, memory, retrieved knowledge, and tool interfaces create attack surfaces. In multi-agent settings, delegation and communication introduce challenges related to identity, trust, capability control, and decision transparency, while the underlying model routing and execution control plane remains vulnerable to manipulation and to unverified model provenance. Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is behavioral containment: sequences of individually permissible actions may collectively violate system-level constraints and safety invariants. At the broader level, supply-chain integrity, provenance, accountability, and end-to-end observability remain largely open problems. A common principle unifies these directions: security must become a verifiable property of the architectures, protocols, and runtimes that govern agent behavior, rather than an optional layer of guidance. Charting these challenges provides a roadmap toward trustworthy autonomous agent deployment.
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.
Multi-provider LLM gateways reverse proxies that route, load-balance, and rate-limit requests across foundation-model APIs have become critical production infrastructure. Yet the failure modes specific to this architectural layer remain undocumented, scattered across issue trackers and post-mortems with no unifying framework. We introduce \fa{}, a two-axis taxonomy that classifies failures by their \emph{origin layer} (Network/Transport, Streaming/Protocol, State/Session, Model~Behavior, Governance/Cost) and their \emph{detectability} (Loud vs.\ Silent). We populate this taxonomy with five verified catalog entries sourced from public bug reports and first-hand stress testing, each accompanied by a mechanistic root-cause analysis. Three entries include standalone reproduction scripts. Our principal finding is that the most operationally severe failures are \emph{silent}: they return HTTP~200, pass every standard health check, and corrupt application state in ways that require semantic-level observability to detect. Two such silent failures a concurrency race condition causing history loss and a streaming index collision corrupting tool-call payloads were discovered first-hand during \cb{} evaluation campaigns.
As multi-agent, tool-using LLM systems are deployed, a common safety net is a runtime monitor that checks each message, tool call, or step on its own. We show this net has a fundamental hole. A distributed backdoor splits a harmful payload across agents, so every local check passes while the assembled object is the attack. The monitor can be right on every step and still miss the attack. The problem is not splitting itself: split fragments can still leak suspicious tokens or provenance edges. The hard case is \emph{local benignness}. No fragment carries the harm, and what is left looks like ordinary benign traffic. We formalize this as an \emph{observability boundary}: a monitor catches only what its view can tell apart from benign traffic. We prove that once the fragments look benign in the monitored view, no detector on that view can catch them, however strong it is. Across a controlled testbed, an external benchmark, and end-to-end agent runs, local monitors lose the signal exactly as local evidence disappears, and it returns only when the monitor sees the assembled object. A monitor trained only on benign traffic recovers the attack's code structure across held-out encodings (0.874 mean AUROC). A decoded-view gate, given the encoding family, blocks every tested attack. But seeing more is not enough: full-trace monitors and decoders still fail unless they reach the representation where the payload is exposed. Local safety is not global safety when harm is compositional, and the open problem is finding that representation.
We characterize observability in representation learning through Platonic Projection Structures (PPS), an operator-theoretic framework for analyzing representation accessibility under partial observation. Rather than treating observable outputs as direct reflections of latent representations, PPS models observation through a self-adjoint positive semidefinite operator acting on a latent representation space. A system is represented as a triple $(H, Π, O)$, where $H$ is a latent representation space, $Π\succeq 0$ is an observation operator, and $O(v)=\langle v,Πv\rangle$ defines an induced scalar observable. Observability is characterized by the quotient geometry $H/\ker(Π)$, representing equivalence classes of latent states indistinguishable under observation. We show that quantum measurement and representation inference under linear observation models share this operator-theoretic structure while differing in the algebraic properties of their observation operators; the correspondence is structural rather than physical. Representation transfer and knowledge distillation can likewise be interpreted as approximate preservation of observable geometry through $ΦΠ_T \approx Π_S Φ$. PPS also reveals a structural limitation of output-based interpretability: latent components in $\ker(Π)$ are inaccessible from induced observables, imposing intrinsic constraints on attribution and explanation methods. Controlled empirical validations demonstrate kernel-invariant observability, projection-induced attribution gaps, and rank-controlled observable geometry in latent representation spaces. PPS thus provides an explicit characterization of observability through operator-induced quotient geometry and a unified perspective on representation accessibility, interpretability, and projection-mediated inference.
Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts that exceed their finite context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem. Existing memory systems improve management through heuristic scoring, retrieval optimization, or learned compression, but largely treat retention as a local decision problem and do not explicitly model its long-term consequences under realistic observability constraints. To fill this gap, we formulate memory retention as a constrained stochastic optimization problem with explicit budget feasibility, evidence utility, and delayed costs including miss penalties, reacquisition delays, and stale-information risk. We then propose OSL-MR (Observability-Safe Learning for Memory Retention), a novel framework that enforces a strict separation between online-observable features and offline-available supervision (OAS). OSL-MR combines an evidence learner trained from realized evidence supervision with a Mixed-Score heuristic that serves both as a deployable online-safe baseline and as a structured inductive prior for learning. The resulting policy learns query-conditioned evidence value directly from interaction data while remaining deployable under the same observability constraints. Experiments on LOCOMO and LongMemEval show that OSL-MR consistently outperforms recency-based methods, Generative Agents-style scoring, and other heuristic baselines, particularly under tight memory budgets. The Mixed-Score prior further improves precision while preserving recall, and sensitivity analysis demonstrates robustness across a wide range of cost configurations.
Microservice systems are widely used to build cloud applications, yet their complexity makes failures inevitable, degrading user experience and causing economic loss. Automated anomaly detection and root cause analysis (RCA) are now active research areas, but existing techniques share five limitations. First, most treat anomaly detection and RCA separately, assuming anomalies are detected correctly, and falter when detection is imprecise due to noise or delay. Second, they focus on metrics, logs, and traces, leaving event data such as API calls and configuration changes underexplored. Third, many require a given service call graph and cannot diagnose without one. Fourth, the field lacks standardised datasets and evaluation frameworks, so methods are hard to compare fairly. Fifth, although causal inference-based RCA has become dominant, its effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness remain unclear. This thesis addresses these limitations through two groups of contributions. The first introduces methods that exploit observability data both independently and collectively. BARO is an end-to-end anomaly detection and RCA approach for metric data. EventADL is an end-to-end framework for event data. TORAI is a multimodal RCA framework that requires no service call graph. Extensive experiments on real microservice systems demonstrate their effectiveness and robustness. The second group delivers benchmarking datasets, an evaluation framework, and systematic evaluation efforts. RCAEval is a comprehensive benchmark providing ready-to-use datasets and reproducible baselines for future research. A systematic evaluation of existing RCA methods, especially causal inference-based approaches, offers insights that guide future directions. This thesis thereby advances automated anomaly detection and RCA for microservice failures, enabling future research on incident mitigation and remediation.
Imitation-learning policies for robot manipulation inherit the quality of the success labels attached to their training episodes, and those labels are usually produced by the robot's own success check. A particularly damaging error is the false success: an episode the robot logs as a success when the task outcome was actually wrong. We ask a narrow but practical question about these episodes. Once an episode has already been flagged as a success, how much of the information needed to overturn that label is present in proprioception, and how much requires vision? We build a simulated testbed on two bimanual ALOHA tasks, induce failures through environment perturbations rather than label edits, label every episode by privileged simulator state that the detector never sees, and keep only episodes the robot flagged as successful. We then compare detectors restricted to proprioception against a vision-based detector. We find that recoverability spans a wide range: in cube transfer the false successes are almost fully recoverable from joint data alone, while in peg insertion proprioception recovers only part of them and a vision detector closes most of the gap. We also show that the proprioceptive separability we measure rests on velocity differences far below any realistic sensor noise floor, so it is best read as an optimistic upper bound that a noiseless simulator inflates. We release the generation and evaluation pipeline.
Asaf Yehudai, Lilach Eden, Michal Shmueli-Scheuercs.CL cs.AI
Agentic systems are becoming more capable: agents define strategies, take actions, and interact with different environments. This autonomy poses serious challenges for overseeing and assessing agent behavior. Most current tools are limited, focusing on observability with basic evaluation capabilities or imposing static, hand-crafted error taxonomies that cannot adapt to new domains. To address this gap, we present Agentic CLEAR, an automatic, dynamic, and easy-to-use evaluation framework. It produces textual insights into the agent behavior on three levels of granularity: system, trace, and node. Agentic CLEAR operates above the observability layer, enabling seamless integration and featuring an intuitive UI that makes agent evaluation highly accessible. In our experiments on four benchmarks, seven agentic settings, and tens of thousands of LLM calls, we show that Agentic CLEAR produces high-quality, data-driven, insightful feedback. Our analysis shows strong alignment with human-annotated errors and the ability to predict task success rate.
Adrian Zvizdenco, Arthur Conrado Veiga Bosquetti, Alberto Lluch Lafuente +1cs.AI
Deciding which sensing capabilities to deploy on an agent in uncertain domains is a fundamental engineering challenge, in which one balances task achievability against the high costs of hardware and processing. This problem has previously been formalized as the Optimal Observability Problem (OOP), based on the well-known Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model for decision-making. This work studies (sub-)symbolic techniques to scale solving of decidable fragments of the OOP, namely the Sensor Selection Problem (SSP) and the Positional Observability Problem (POP). Besides improving the original approach based on parameter synthesis, we develop a new solving method that identifies sensible observation functions via decomposition of POMDPs, improving performance by 3 and 5 orders of magnitude for instance size and runtime, respectively.
Jiahang Lin, Shichun Liu, Chengjun Pan +6cs.CL cs.SE
Harnesses have become a central determinant of coding-agent performance, shaping how models interact with repositories, tools, and execution environments. Yet automating harness engineering is hard: a heterogeneous action space, sparse and noisy evaluation signal, multi-million-token trajectories, and edits whose effect is hard to attribute to the next round's outcomes. We introduce Agentic Harness Engineering (AHE), a framework that automates harness-level evolution by instrumenting the three stages of any engineering loop (component editing, trajectory inspection, and decision making) with matched observability pillars: (1) component observability gives every editable harness component a file-level representation so the action space is explicit and revertible; (2) experience observability distills millions of raw trajectory tokens into a layered, drill-down evidence corpus that an evolving agent can actually consume; and (3) decision observability pairs every edit with a self-declared prediction, later verified against the next round's task-level outcomes. Together, these pillars turn every edit into a falsifiable contract, so harness evolution proceeds autonomously without collapsing into trial-and-error. Empirically, ten AHE iterations lift pass@1 on Terminal-Bench 2 from 69.7% to 77.0%, surpassing the human-designed harness Codex-CLI (71.9%) and the self-evolving baselines ACE and TF-GRPO. The frozen harness transfers without re-evolution: on SWE-bench-verified it tops aggregate success at 12% fewer tokens than the seed, and on Terminal-Bench 2 it yields +5.1 to +10.1pp cross-family gains across three alternate model families, indicating the evolved components encode general engineering experience rather than benchmark-specific tuning. These results position observability-driven evolution as a practical pathway to keep coding-agent harnesses continually improving.
Deploying production-ready multi-agent systems (MAS) in complex industrial environments remains challenging due to limitations in scalability, observability, and autonomous evolution. We present OxyGent, an open-source framework that enables modular, observable, and evolvable MAS via a unified Oxy abstraction, in which agents, tools, LLMs, and reasoning flows are encapsulated as pluggable atomic components. This Lego-like assembly paradigm supports scalable system composition and non-intrusive monitoring. To enhance observability, OxyGent introduces permission-driven dynamic planning that replaces rigid workflows with execution graphs generated at runtime, which provide adaptive visualizations. To support continuous evolution, the framework integrates OxyBank, an AI asset management platform that supports automated data backflow, annotation, and joint evolution. Empirical evaluations and real-world case studies show that OxyGent provides a robust and scalable foundation for MAS. OxyGent is publicly available at https://oxygent.jd.com/.