Automata from Agent Traces: Failure and Next-Step Prediction

arXiv:2608.23670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents execute multi-step tasks, but their behavioral structure remains opaque: long unstructured traces resist the safety auditing and runtime monitoring that deployment requires. Existing approaches operate per-trace or success-only, so they miss the cross-run topology that links next-step and failure prediction. To recover that shared structure, we collapse an entire trace corpus into a single, compact finite-state machine (FSM) that serves as a structural substrate for the otherwise unpredictable behavior of LLM agents. Across twelve public datasets, the FSMs are compact (7-43 states), replay held-out data at >=0.997 fitness with near-identical topology across splits, and build in milliseconds. This substrate addresses both prediction goals. For next-step prediction, FSM-state context outperforms Agent Workflow Memory on every ground-truth-matched dataset. For failure prediction, per-state behavioral features reach held-out AUROC up to 0.94, and an online monitor ranks failing runs above passing ones from a partial trace, triggering early stopping well before completion. Behavioral topology thus appears shaped more by the deployment harness than by the LLM, providing a model-agnostic structural primitive for safety auditing and runtime monitoring.

Related

• Managed Autonomy at Runtime: Gear-Based Safety and Governance for Single- and Multi-Agent Cyber-Physical Systems
• From Agent Traces to Trust: Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents
• STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-26