Failure Mode Analysis

Ablation of the two-Q architecture confirms role separation: using Q-minus alone leads to frequent failure in the back of sparse plumes, while using Q-plus alone increases failure near the source. As plume sparsity increases, failures shift progressively to locations far downwind of the source, indicating agents become trapped in informationally sparse regions. In dense plumes, agent failures cluster near the odor source, indicating overshooting as the dominant failure mechanism. A single-Q agent trained in one sparsity regime lacks the behavioral repertoire to counter the dominant failure mode of a different regime, resulting in poor cross-environment generalization.