ReplayRCA: Measuring Post-hoc Diagnosis and Live Oversight of Agent Failures by Counterfactual Replay

arXiv:2610.41025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language-model agent fails a multi-step task, can another model find the decisive mistake and fix it with a single action? We introduce ReplayRCA, a benchmark that scores such diagnoses by intervention rather than by agreement with annotations: the environment is restored to the state preceding the chosen step, the proposed action replaces the agent's own, and the same agent continues. The score, causal repair, is the continuation success rate minus that of a paired placebo that replays the agent's original action through the same mechanism. Two tracks share this protocol: a post-hoc autopsy, where the diagnoser sees the whole failed run and is told that it failed, and live oversight, where a supervisor watches the run unfold and may intervene once, before an irreversible action, without knowing whether the run will fail. Tasks come from OpsWorld, a deterministic, procedurally generated back-office environment with six difficulty levels, the last of which is multimodal (QR codes, handwriting). On 62 calibrated systematic failures, the best of 13 frontier models (Grok 4.7) reaches a causal repair of +51.3 points; the top eight m