Paper Detail

Agentic Root Cause Analysis through Evidence-Grounded Reasoning

Amaury Wei, Olga Fink

arxiv Score 16.3

Published 2026-07-24 · First seen 2026-07-27

General AI

Abstract

Diagnosing the root cause of anomalies is essential for safe industrial operation. Despite extensive sensor instrumentation, formulating hypotheses and gathering evidence remains a manual process, creating a major operational bottleneck. While existing data-driven approaches aim to automate this, two critical limitations restrict their deployment: their operate as black boxes unable to justify their diagnosis, and they require scarce labeled examples of faulty operation. To address this gap, we introduce AgentRCA, a zero-shot agentic framework for evidence-grounded root cause analysis. Rather than learning fault-specific mappings, AgentRCA performs inference-time reasoning by combining a data-driven digital twin (modeling normal system dynamics) with a tool-augmented large language model. The agent iteratively gathers statistical evidence, evaluates competing hypotheses, and identifies the physical fault that best explains the observed behavior. Evaluated on a real-world multiphase-flow facility and a large-scale chemical plant, AgentRCA achieves diagnostic performance competitive with fully supervised baselines without relying on fault-specific training. Crucially, it produces transparent reasoning traces that explicitly link observed symptoms to their underlying physical causes. These results establish autonomous hypothesis-driven reasoning as a practical foundation for scalable industrial root cause analysis.

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BibTeX

@article{wei2026agentic,
  title = {Agentic Root Cause Analysis through Evidence-Grounded Reasoning},
  author = {Amaury Wei and Olga Fink},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Diagnosing the root cause of anomalies is essential for safe industrial operation. Despite extensive sensor instrumentation, formulating hypotheses and gathering evidence remains a manual process, creating a major operational bottleneck. While existing data-driven approaches aim to automate this, two critical limitations restrict their deployment: their operate as black boxes unable to justify their diagnosis, and they require scarce labeled examples of faulty operation. To address this gap, we },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22385},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2607.22385},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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