POIROT: Interrogating Agents for Failure Detection in Multi-Agent Systems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02282v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:05:35 GMT
• Title: POIROT: Interrogating Agents for Failure Detection in Multi-Agent Systems
• Abstract summary: We present POIROT, a protocol that repurposes a system's own agents as its diagnostic layer.<n>Across evaluated settings, POIROT outperforms single-LLM baseline evaluators.<n>We release POIROT as an open-source library alongside BLAME, a benchmark for fault attribution in safety-critical multi-agent systems.
• Score: 0.07783271875179179
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Orchestrating Large Language Models into Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) has unlocked remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet emergent failures and hallucinations that resist characterisation block their deployment in safety-critical domains -- a gap made legally untenable by emerging AI regulation. Existing evaluation paradigms share a common flaw: centralised judgment creates single points of failure and demands domain-specific expertise. Here we present POIROT, a protocol that repurposes a system's own agents as its diagnostic layer, leveraging the epistemic diversity already present in the architecture. Across evaluated settings, POIROT outperforms single-LLM evaluator baselines, with gains that scale with problem complexity (OR = 1.60, $p = 0.008$), agent count, and fault dimensionality, persisting under compound fault conditions. These results demonstrate that safety oversight need not be externalised: the agents executing a role carry sufficient collective intelligence to audit it. We release POIROT as an open-source library alongside BLAME, a benchmark for fault attribution in safety-critical multi-agent systems.

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