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Diagnosis Before Recovery: Turning Agent Failures into Selective Self-Correction

Pan Wang, Yihao Hu, Hang Wang, Zirui Lv, Xin Zhang, Jianshe Li, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Wu, Yongqi Tong · Aug 12, 2026 · Citations: 0

Simulation Env
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How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair. Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure. This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format errors. Our insight is that development-set failures can recover part of the missing diagnostic substrate by deciding which recovery interventions are admissible before test-time correction. We propose DARC, a diagnosis-guided recovery harness that profiles task-family failure modes, prunes mismatched interventions from a shared recovery library, and freezes a verifier-selected success-cost policy for deployment. This causal order makes correction selective: the harness first determines what kind of failure can be repaired, then decides how much recovery evidence to spend. In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget. Our experiments show that failures need not trigger uniformly more context: DARC turns self-correction from prompt expansion into recovery-interface design. DARC provides a practical route toward more reliable agents in domains where compiler-like feedback is absent: making failures actionable before making contexts larger.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

7/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 45%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Simulation Env

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair."

Benchmarks / Datasets

partial

ALFWorld

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget."

Reported Metrics

partial

Precision

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Medicine, Coding

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Simulation Env
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

ALFWorld

Reported Metrics

precision

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair.
  • Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure.
  • This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format errors.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Simulation environment) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure.
  • This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format…
  • We propose DARC, a diagnosis-guided recovery harness that profiles task-family failure modes, prunes mismatched interventions from a shared recovery library, and freezes a verifier-selected success-cost policy for deployment.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure.
  • This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Simulation Env

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: ALFWorld

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: precision

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