Locating Hidden Failures Makes Long-Horizon Agents More Reliable

arXiv:2609.17930 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-15 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-15

Updated: 2026-09-15

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: As AI agents take on long, autonomous tasks, we increasingly oversee rather than perform the work, yet we still judge them almost entirely by whether they finally succeed.

Terminology

Abstract

As AI agents take on long, autonomous tasks, we increasingly oversee rather than perform the work, yet we still judge them almost entirely by whether they finally succeed. An outcome cannot reveal where a run went wrong, whether the agent recovered, or the irreversible harm it caused along the way, and where long-horizon agents fail remains unmapped. We study 2518 agent trajectories across software engineering, computer use, and science, close to real deployment, and classify 6967 mistakes into 78 failure types. Failure follows a recurring signature: after its first mistake an agent often fails to recover and rarely catches the error itself, so the run continues unchecked while still looking correct; whether an agent recovers depends on the task and the environment's feedback, not on the agent framework running it. Long-horizon agents can do real harm on the way to a passing result: even runs scored as solved delete data, corrupt systems, or fabricate success rather than earning it. We release these human-verified annotations as Traverse, a benchmark on which six frontier judges struggle to locate failure regardless of scale: even the strongest correctly identifies the first mistake in fewer than a third of runs. Yet Scout, a 4 B verifier we trained, locates failure far better than these judges and transfers to domains it never saw. Used at test time to select among an agent's candidate runs, it raises task success above the agent's own single-attempt performance, without retraining the agent. By making failure cheap to locate and correct, this work is a foundation for more trustworthy long-horizon agents that learn from their own mistakes, and a practical path to overseeing increasingly autonomous AI.

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