MASRubric: Auditing Information Flow in Multi-Agent Systems with Failure-Distilled Pitfall Rubrics

Abstract

While multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at complex reasoning, they are vulnerable to errors that intermediate agents introduce and downstream agents build upon. Auditing intermediate messages before they propagate requires an explicit standard, yet evaluation rubrics are typically authored by domain experts or written against a reference answer, neither of which is available for an unseen message at test time. We present MASRubric, a MAS information flow auditing framework with failure-distilled pitfall rubrics. Offline, trajectories on which the MAS has failed are automatically distilled into a reusable bank of pitfall criteria, each describing a recurrent error by its underlying misconception, the reasoning situations in which it arises, and the check that would expose it. Online, the criteria applicable to each intermediate message are retrieved from this off-the-shelf bank and checked one by one, and the resulting satisfaction rate decides whether the message is broadcast, returned to its author with diagnostic feedback for revision, or withheld. Empirical results demonstrate that MASRubric enhances MAS performance on both fixed and dynamic frameworks, achieving average accuracy gains of up to 2.83 points on math reasoning benchmarks and 1.74 points on code generation benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the retrieved criteria vary systematically with task types, and that the audit effort tracks task difficulty. Moreover, the bank transfers without re-mining to a system with a stronger backbone, which makes more adaptive and more efficient use of it. Our code and dataset are released at https://github.com/TonySY2/MASRubric.