PROV-AGENT: Unified Provenance for Tracking AI Agent Interactions in Agentic Workflows

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Souza, Renan, Gueroudji, Amal, DeWitt, Stephen, Rosendo, Daniel, Ghosal, Tirthankar, Ross, Robert, Balaprakash, Prasanna, da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866912545445511168
author Souza, Renan
Gueroudji, Amal
DeWitt, Stephen
Rosendo, Daniel
Ghosal, Tirthankar
Ross, Robert
Balaprakash, Prasanna
da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
author_facet Souza, Renan
Gueroudji, Amal
DeWitt, Stephen
Rosendo, Daniel
Ghosal, Tirthankar
Ross, Robert
Balaprakash, Prasanna
da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) and other foundation models are increasingly used as the core of AI agents. In agentic workflows, these agents plan tasks, interact with humans and peers, and influence scientific outcomes across federated and heterogeneous environments. However, agents can hallucinate or reason incorrectly, propagating errors when one agent's output becomes another's input. Thus, assuring that agents' actions are transparent, traceable, reproducible, and reliable is critical to assess hallucination risks and mitigate their workflow impacts. While provenance techniques have long supported these principles, existing methods fail to capture and relate agent-centric metadata such as prompts, responses, and decisions with the broader workflow context and downstream outcomes. In this paper, we introduce PROV-AGENT, a provenance model that extends W3C PROV and leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and data observability to integrate agent interactions into end-to-end workflow provenance. Our contributions include: (1) a provenance model tailored for agentic workflows, (2) a near real-time, open-source system for capturing agentic provenance, and (3) a cross-facility evaluation spanning edge, cloud, and HPC environments, demonstrating support for critical provenance queries and agent reliability analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_02866
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PROV-AGENT: Unified Provenance for Tracking AI Agent Interactions in Agentic Workflows
Souza, Renan
Gueroudji, Amal
DeWitt, Stephen
Rosendo, Daniel
Ghosal, Tirthankar
Ross, Robert
Balaprakash, Prasanna
da Silva, Rafael Ferreira
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Databases
68T42, 68T30, 68P20, 68Q85, 68M14,
D.2.12; H.2.4; I.2.11; C.2.4; H.3.4
Large Language Models (LLMs) and other foundation models are increasingly used as the core of AI agents. In agentic workflows, these agents plan tasks, interact with humans and peers, and influence scientific outcomes across federated and heterogeneous environments. However, agents can hallucinate or reason incorrectly, propagating errors when one agent's output becomes another's input. Thus, assuring that agents' actions are transparent, traceable, reproducible, and reliable is critical to assess hallucination risks and mitigate their workflow impacts. While provenance techniques have long supported these principles, existing methods fail to capture and relate agent-centric metadata such as prompts, responses, and decisions with the broader workflow context and downstream outcomes. In this paper, we introduce PROV-AGENT, a provenance model that extends W3C PROV and leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and data observability to integrate agent interactions into end-to-end workflow provenance. Our contributions include: (1) a provenance model tailored for agentic workflows, (2) a near real-time, open-source system for capturing agentic provenance, and (3) a cross-facility evaluation spanning edge, cloud, and HPC environments, demonstrating support for critical provenance queries and agent reliability analysis.
title PROV-AGENT: Unified Provenance for Tracking AI Agent Interactions in Agentic Workflows
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Databases
68T42, 68T30, 68P20, 68Q85, 68M14,
D.2.12; H.2.4; I.2.11; C.2.4; H.3.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02866