Capable but Unreliable: Canonical Path Deviation as a Causal Mechanism of Agent Failure in Long-Horizon Tasks

Abstract

Why do language agents fail on tasks they are capable of solving? We argue that many such failures are reliability failures caused by stochastic drift from a task's latent solution structure, not capability failures. Every well-defined tool-use task imposes a canonical solution path (i.e., a convergent set of tool invocations shared across successful runs) and agent success depends critically on whether a trajectory stays within this path's operating envelope. We establish this causally using a natural experiment that holds model capability and task difficulty fixed by construction. We analyze trajectories from the Toolathlon benchmark: 22 frontier models each attempt 108 real-world tool-use tasks across 3 independent runs, yielding 515 model$\times$task units where the same model succeeds on some runs and fails on others due to LLM sampling stochasticity alone. Within these units, successful runs adhere significantly more closely to the canonical solution path than failed runs ($+$0.060 Jaccard, $p<0.0001$, $n=488$ units, 95% CI [+0.043, +0.077]). This result survives six robustness checks including cross-model-family leave-one-out validation. Critically, the causal mechanism is gradual and self-reinforcing: the adherence gap is statistically indistinguishable from zero through the first 50% of the trajectory, ruling out early-branching selection bias, and each off-canonical tool call raises the probability that the next call is also off-canonical by 22.7 percentage points ($\hat{\beta}=+0.227$, $p<0.0001$), more than doubling the baseline rate. These findings imply that agent reliability cannot be improved by capability scaling alone, but offer a highly actionable intervention: a simple monitor that restarts the bottom tercile of runs based on mid-trajectory canonical adherence lifts success rates by $+$8.8 percentage points among intervened runs.