DART: An Analytical Failure-Attribution Study for Multimodal Edge Assistants

The significant contribution of this research is the development of DART, a five-layer Deployment-Aware Reliability Taxonomy for identifying where failures occur in multimodal edge assistants. It separates task-path failures from runtime/resource and connectivity-related exposure, enabling more precise reliability diagnosis than a single overall success rate. The framework is further supported by layer-specific metrics and a real case-study analysis using NORA.