AgentCheck: A Reproduce–Intervene–Mitigate Workbench for LLM Agents over MCP

Aritra Mazumder, Nusrat Jahan Lia


Abstract
Tool-using LLM agents are mostly evaluated assuming all tools work. When a tool times out, returns a week-stale value, or has its description poisoned in deployment, the developer needs a controlled way to reproduce the failure, test a fix, and confirm the fix worked before deployment. We present AgentCheck, an open-source web workbench that turns an MCP server into an intervention surface. AgentCheck runs an agent against its real tools and records every tool response, then re-runs the agent with the response perturbed by a fault (12 types) injector. Matching tool calls are replayed from cache, and later tool calls go live after the agent diverges. This yields a reproduce-intervene-confirm loop: the developer toggles a mitigation, re-runs against the identical fault, and sees if the failure goes away. Scoring has two parts: deterministic pass/fail rules, plus an LLM judge for interpretive labels, validated against human annotations. Across five agents, the best passes 105/120 scenarios and the weakest only 77. The failures are usually silent, confident use of incorrect tool outputs rather than crashes. On the weakest agent, a retry mitigation raises success on timeout error faults from as few as 30% of cases to 100%, whereas stale-data faults remain near 3-4 of 10 regardless of the mitigation. AgentCheck makes these failure modes reproducible, comparable, and verifiable before deployment.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-demos.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Sweta Agrawal, Alberto Abad
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
674–684
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-demos.64/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aritra Mazumder and Nusrat Jahan Lia. 2026. AgentCheck: A Reproduce–Intervene–Mitigate Workbench for LLM Agents over MCP. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 674–684, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AgentCheck: A Reproduce–Intervene–Mitigate Workbench for LLM Agents over MCP (Mazumder & Lia, EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-demos.64.pdf