EMNLP
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2026
Finding Where the Buck Stops: An Automated Failure Attribution-Based Reflection Framework for Multi-Agent Collaboration
citeark/finding-where-the-buck-stops-an-automated-failure-attribution-based-reflection-f--j878vv
The paper introduces DoCtOR, a reflection framework for large-language-model multi-agent systems. DoCtOR uses a process-reward-based ProFA diagnosis module to identify the first incorrect reasoning step and responsible agent in a failed trajectory, a counterfactual correction module to propose and score an alternative action, and a reflector that gives targeted feedback to the decisive error agent. The authors evaluate the framework on HotPotQA, ChartQAPro, and Mind2Web, compare it with Reflexion, Retroformer, and COPPER, and separately evaluate ProFA against automated failure-attribution baselines on held-in and held-out Who & When data. Additional experiments study model size, test-set size, trajectory scope, correctness threshold, and component ablations.
