Error-Crystallization Amplification

Properties

family: amplification
severity: systemic
triggerError: A single atomic factuality or faithfulness error is injected into (or arises within) a shared multi-agent interaction chain.
mechanism: The seed error is repeatedly cited and reused across the agent dependency graph; each agent that adopts it raises the probability that connected agents adopt it too (non-linear contagion modeled via spectral-radius growth), and when the system enters a supercritical regime the error crystallizes into shared constraints that all subsequent steps are built upon, making correction increasingly costly.
blastRadius: Without intervention, the cascade infects the majority of agent runs; the error solidifies into shared context artifacts (sources, assumptions, code skeletons, evaluation criteria) that downstream agents treat as ground truth.
mast: [Cat 2][Cat 3]
detection: Monitor per-agent adoption rate of a specific claim; rapid cross-agent agreement on an unverified claim signals supercritical propagation; spectral-radius analysis of the dependency graph identifies the highest-leverage infection vectors. Online cross-channel causal monitoring can additionally attribute a live cascade, identifying the origin, bridge, and amplifier agents and reconstructing its principal propagation pathways at sub-1% latency overhead (CASPIAN, arXiv:2605.19240).
mitigation: Maintain an immutable reference layer that agents check before adopting a peer's claim; introduce governance probes that inject verified contradictions to arrest supercritical spread; require independent sourcing before a claim enters the shared constraint layer.
source: From Spark to Fire: Modeling and Mitigating Error Cascades in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration (arXiv:2603.04474)

Provenance

Source: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.04474v1

Properties

family

amplification

severity

systemic

triggerError

A single atomic factuality or faithfulness error is injected into (or arises within) a shared multi-agent interaction chain.

mechanism

The seed error is repeatedly cited and reused across the agent dependency graph; each agent that adopts it raises the probability that connected agents adopt it too (non-linear contagion modeled via spectral-radius growth), and when the system enters a supercritical regime the error crystallizes into shared constraints that all subsequent steps are built upon, making correction increasingly costly.

blastRadius

Without intervention, the cascade infects the majority of agent runs; the error solidifies into shared context artifacts (sources, assumptions, code skeletons, evaluation criteria) that downstream agents treat as ground truth.

mast

[Cat 2][Cat 3]

detection

Monitor per-agent adoption rate of a specific claim; rapid cross-agent agreement on an unverified claim signals supercritical propagation; spectral-radius analysis of the dependency graph identifies the highest-leverage infection vectors. Online cross-channel causal monitoring can additionally attribute a live cascade, identifying the origin, bridge, and amplifier agents and reconstructing its principal propagation pathways at sub-1% latency overhead (CASPIAN, arXiv:2605.19240).

mitigation

Maintain an immutable reference layer that agents check before adopting a peer's claim; introduce governance probes that inject verified contradictions to arrest supercritical spread; require independent sourcing before a claim enters the shared constraint layer.

source

From Spark to Fire: Modeling and Mitigating Error Cascades in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration (arXiv:2603.04474)