Diagnosis Is Not Prescription: Linguistic Co-Adaptation Explains Patching Hazards in LLM Pipelines
When a multi-module LLM agent fails, the module most responsible for the failure is not necessarily the best place to intervene. We demonstrate this Diagnostic Paradox empirically: causal analysis consistently identifies the routing module -- which selects which tool to call next -- as the primary bottleneck across three independent agent families. Yet injecting prompt-level correction examples into this module consistently degrades performance, sometimes severely. Patching an upstream query-rewriting module instead reliably improves outcomes. The effect holds with statistical significance on two agent families and directional consistency on a third; alternative repair strategies at the r...
| Authors | Yoon Jeonghun, Kim Dongchan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 21 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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