Lauren Pothuru
Author directory2026
When Failures Propagate: Causal Failure Attribution in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Lauren Pothuru
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Lauren Pothuru
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) interleaves retrieval, reasoning, and answer generation across multiple hops. A retrieval error at hop 1 can surface only as a wrong answer at hop 3, while later retrieval can also repair the trajectory. This paper introduces AgenticRAG-FP, an interventional benchmark for causal failure attribution in agentic RAG. The benchmark injects a certified fault at a specified hop, re-executes the downstream trajectory, and evaluates diagnosers against the known intervention site. Its central question is whether a post-hoc trace still identifies the injected hop after the suffix changes. In the dense Claude Haiku 4.5 structural sweep on three-hop MuSiQue questions, coverage-based diagnosis is 0.91 at hop 1 and 0.00 at hops 2 and 3 (n=43, 36, 21 failed trajectories), but it predicts hop 1 in 96% of failures, an earliest-hop rule; at hops 2 and 3, an LLM judge and frozen-hop repair localize only 0.25 to 0.48 of failures. In larger content-corruption runs, depth-2 exact-hop accuracy is 0.00 for coverage, 0.49 for an LLM judge, 0.59 for frozen-hop repair, and 0.14 for suffix regeneration (n=51); the judge and frozen-hop repair do not significantly differ (exact McNemar p=0.33).