Diagnosing and Mitigating Compounding Failures in Agentic Persuasion via Taxonomic Strategy Retrieval

arXiv:2606.24976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation-model agents in multi-step, open-ended environments frequently suffer from compounding errors, where early mistakes contaminate long-horizon trajectories. While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) succeeds in deterministic domains, agents in subjective tasks like persuasion experience severe problem drift and sycophantic conformity. We identify semantic leakage in standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a reproducible trigger for these fai...