---
license: apache-2.0
task_categories:
- other
tags:
- agents
- observability
- failure-analysis
- root-cause-analysis
- tracing
language:
- en
pretty_name: Runopsy-Bench
size_categories:
- n<1K
---

# Runopsy-Bench

Twenty labelled agent traces for measuring **failure-onset localization**: given a run
that went wrong, which step did it start going wrong at — not which step it stopped at.

Produced for [Runopsy](https://github.com/vahit19/runopsy), an open-source causal failure
analysis engine for agent runs. `pip install runopsy`.

## Read this first: these traces are synthetic

Every case here was **generated, not recorded**. They are single-fault traces written to
exercise a specific failure mode, with the onset declared by construction rather than
judged by a person.

That makes them useful for one thing and useless for another:

- **Useful** for regression testing and for comparing localization strategies on a fixed,
  reproducible set. The same code always produces the same numbers.
- **Useless** as evidence that a tool saves anyone time on real work. A benchmark whose
  author also wrote the engine measures agreement with its own assumptions.

If you want human-labelled traces of real agents, use
[TRAIL](https://huggingface.co/datasets/PatronusAI/TRAIL) or
[Who&When](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Kevin355/Who_and_When) instead. Runopsy scores
**0.0%** on both, and that result is published alongside its 94.4% here — see *Results*
below.

## Format

One JSON object per line in `runopsy_bench.jsonl`:

| field | meaning |
| --- | --- |
| `name` | case identifier |
| `category` | failure taxonomy class (`tool_execution`, `state`, `handoff`, …) |
| `description` | what the case is meant to represent |
| `onset_step` | **the ground truth**: sequence number where it started going wrong, or `null` for the healthy case |
| `affected_steps` | steps the onset plausibly reached |
| `is_healthy` | true for the one case with nothing wrong, used to measure false positives |
| `deterministically_detectable` | whether structural analysis alone can reach it |
| `events` | the trace, as OpenInference-compatible typed events |

Events carry `run_start`, `tool_call`, `llm_call`, `state_snapshot`, `memory_op`, `claim`,
`handoff` and `run_end` kinds with hashes rather than payload text.

## Results

Measured with `runopsy bench --compare`, reproducible offline:

| strategy | top-1 | top-3 | mean step distance |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| no diagnosis | 0.0% | 0.0% | — |
| blame the last failing step *(what reading a log achieves)* | 22.2% | 44.4% | 3.50 |
| blame the earliest failing step | 50.0% | 50.0% | 1.31 |
| Runopsy deterministic engine | **94.4%** | **100.0%** | **0.11** |

False positive rate on the healthy case: 0.0%.

**Where the same engine fails**, on labelled traces somebody else annotated:

| benchmark | onset top-1 |
| --- | ---: |
| TRAIL (expert-labelled SWE-Bench agent traces) | 0.0% |
| Who&When (expert-labelled multi-agent traces) | 0.0% |

On TRAIL, not one of the 30 annotated onsets carries an error status of any kind — they
are formatting mistakes, instruction non-compliance, a wrong assumption about a file path.
Runopsy's deterministic layers read exit codes and tool statuses, so they are blind to
those by construction. The 94.4% above is on traces where the onset *was itself a
failure*. Both numbers belong on the same page.

## Loading

```python
import json

cases = [json.loads(line) for line in open("runopsy_bench.jsonl", encoding="utf-8")]
print(cases[0]["onset_step"], len(cases[0]["events"]))
```

Or with the tool that produced it:

```bash
pip install runopsy
runopsy bench --compare        # reproduces the table above
```

## Licence and citation

Apache-2.0.

```bibtex
@software{feryad_runopsy,
  author  = {Feryad, Vahit},
  title   = {Runopsy: causal failure analysis for AI agent runs},
  url     = {https://github.com/vahit19/runopsy},
  orcid   = {0000-0002-3282-339X}
}
```