ConceptSeries System Reliability / 串联系统可靠性问题 / 链式失败
Cascading Degradation
A phenomenon in multi-step AI agent pipelines where the overall success rate drops sharply as individual per-step success rates are multiplied together. Rooted in serial-system reliability engineering, it is especially difficult to detect in LLM-driven agents due to soft failures such as semantic drift, which do not surface as explicit errors.
Timeline (last 90 days)
Oct 7
A per-step success rate that looks very high gets rapidly diluted across a long chain, with degradation becoming more severe as the number of steps increases.
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