Why Agentic Workflows Fail: A Taxonomy Derived from Literature and Empirical Data
Agentic workflows combine large language models with planning, memory, tools, execution environments, and iterative feedback. Their failures are difficult to diagnose because the same user-visible symptom may originate from model behavior, workflow orchestration, external tools, infrastructure, or their interaction. This paper presents a source-aware taxonomy of agentic workflow failures and applies it to evidence from academic literature and GitHub. The taxonomy combines source attribution with three empirical dimensions: a concrete failure-type dictionary, workflow-stage localization, and agent-capability localization. Its central structure is a two-axis localization matrix: workflow st...
| Authors | Xin Li, Rami Bahsoon, Tao Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 12 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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