arXiv subjects

Xuyan Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Xuyan Ma.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Diagnosis-Driven Automatic Repair for Agentic Workflow via Symbolic Inference

Platform-orchestrated agentic workflows have become a popular paradigm for developing LLM-based applications. However, their reliability remains a major challenge due to the uncertainty of LLM outputs, complex inter-node dependencies, and heterogeneous tool interactions. Existing agentic workflow optimization and agent enhancement methods primarily rely on trajectory-level feedback. Without explicitly identifying the underlying failure root causes, their resulting repair plans are often insufficiently targeted. We propose FlowFixer, a diagnosis-driven automated repair framework for agentic workflows. FlowFixer first transforms workflow executions into unified symbolic traces and performs symbolic inference to derive executable behavioral specifications that capture node correctness, temporal dependencies, and causal relationships. Based on specification verification, it conducts failure attribution and root cause analysis, and then generates targeted repair patches. To reduce verification costs, FlowFixer further employs a multi-dimensional pre-execution assessment to filter infeasible repairs before dynamic verification. We evaluate FlowFixer on workflow failures collected from three popular development platforms: Dify, Coze and n8n. Results show that FlowFixer achieves a repair success rate of 71.3%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by 11.9% to 27.6%. It also improves failure attribution accuracy by 4.8% to 33.1% and root cause analysis accuracy by 15.3% to 38.8%. This work offers a new perspective on reliable diagnosis and repair of agentic workflows through symbolic modeling and inference.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

SynAT: Enhancing Security Knowledge Bases via Automatic Synthesizing Attack Tree from Crowd Discussions

Cyber attacks have become a serious threat to the security of software systems. Many organizations have built their security knowledge bases to safeguard against attacks and vulnerabilities. However, due to the time lag in the official release of security information, these security knowledge bases may not be well maintained, and using them to protect software systems against emergent security risks can be challenging. On the other hand, the security posts on online knowledge-sharing platforms contain many crowd security discussions and the knowledge in those posts can be used to enhance the security knowledge bases. This paper proposes SynAT, an automatic approach to synthesize attack trees from crowd security posts. Given a security post, SynAT first utilize the Large Language Model (LLM) and prompt learning to restrict the scope of sentences that may contain attack information; then it utilizes a transition-based event and relation extraction model to extract the events and relations simultaneously from the scope; finally, it applies heuristic rules to synthesize the attack trees with the extracted events and relations. An experimental evaluation is conducted on 5,070 Stack Overflow security posts, and the results show that SynAT outperforms all baselines in both event and relation extraction, and achieves the highest tree similarity in attack tree synthesis. Furthermore, SynAT has been applied to enhance HUAWEI's security knowledge base as well as public security knowledge bases CVE and CAPEC, which demonstrates SynAT's practicality.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Demystifying the Lifecycle of Failures in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Workflows

Agentic workflows built on low-code orchestration platforms enable rapid development of multi-agent systems, but they also introduce new and poorly understood failure modes that hinder reliability and maintainability. Unlike traditional software systems, failures in agentic workflows often propagate across heterogeneous nodes through natural-language interactions, tool invocations, and dynamic control logic, making failure attribution and repair particularly challenging. In this paper, we present an empirical study of platform-orchestrated agentic workflows from a failure lifecycle perspective, with the goal of characterizing failure manifestations, identifying underlying root causes, and examining corresponding repair strategies. We present AgentFail, a dataset of 307 real-world failure cases collected from two representative agentic workflow platforms. Based on this dataset, we analyze failure patterns, root causes, and repair difficulty for various failure root causes and nodes in the workflow. Our findings reveal key failure mechanisms in agentic workflows and provide actionable guidelines for reliable failure repair, and real-world agentic workflow design.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Robust Multi-agent Communication Based on Decentralization-Oriented Adversarial Training

In typical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems, communication is important for agents to share information and make the right decisions. However, due to the complexity of training multi-agent communication, existing methods often fall into the dilemma of local optimization, which leads to the concentration of communication in a limited number of channels and presents an unbalanced structure. Such unbalanced communication policy are vulnerable to abnormal conditions, where the damage of critical communication channels can trigger the crash of the entire system. Inspired by decentralization theory in sociology, we propose DMAC, which enhances the robustness of multi-agent communication policies by retraining them into decentralized patterns. Specifically, we train an adversary DMAC\_Adv which can dynamically identify and mask the critical communication channels, and then apply the adversarial samples generated by DMAC\_Adv to the adversarial learning of the communication policy to force the policy in exploring other potential communication schemes and transition to a decentralized structure. As a training method to improve robustness, DMAC can be fused with any learnable communication policy algorithm. The experimental results in two communication policies and four multi-agent tasks demonstrate that DMAC achieves higher improvement on robustness and performance of communication policy compared with two state-of-the-art and commonly-used baselines. Also, the results demonstrate that DMAC can achieve decentralized communication structure with acceptable communication cost.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2021

VTLayout: Fusion of Visual and Text Features for Document Layout Analysis

Documents often contain complex physical structures, which make the Document Layout Analysis (DLA) task challenging. As a pre-processing step for content extraction, DLA has the potential to capture rich information in historical or scientific documents on a large scale. Although many deep-learning-based methods from computer vision have already achieved excellent performance in detecting \emph{Figure} from documents, they are still unsatisfactory in recognizing the \emph{List}, \emph{Table}, \emph{Text} and \emph{Title} category blocks in DLA. This paper proposes a VTLayout model fusing the documents' deep visual, shallow visual, and text features to localize and identify different category blocks. The model mainly includes two stages, and the three feature extractors are built in the second stage. In the first stage, the Cascade Mask R-CNN model is applied directly to localize all category blocks of the documents. In the second stage, the deep visual, shallow visual, and text features are extracted for fusion to identify the category blocks of documents. As a result, we strengthen the classification power of different category blocks based on the existing localization technique. The experimental results show that the identification capability of the VTLayout is superior to the most advanced method of DLA based on the PubLayNet dataset, and the F1 score is as high as 0.9599.

cs.IR↗