Reasoning Provenance for Autonomous AI Agents: Structured Behavioral Analytics Beyond State Checkpoints and Execution Traces

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vispute, Neelmani, Kadam, Aditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Vispute, Neelmani
Kadam, Aditya
author_facet Vispute, Neelmani
Kadam, Aditya
contents As AI agents transition from human-supervised copilots to autonomous platform infrastructure, the ability to analyze their reasoning behavior across populations of investigations becomes a pressing infrastructure requirement. Existing operational tooling addresses adjacent needs effectively: state checkpoint systems enable fault tolerance; observability platforms provide execution traces for debugging; telemetry standards ensure interoperability. What current systems do not natively provide as a first-class, schema-level primitive is structured reasoning provenance -- normalized, queryable records of why the agent chose each action, what it concluded from each observation, how each conclusion shaped its strategy, and which evidence supports its final verdict. This paper introduces the Agent Execution Record (AER), a structured reasoning provenance primitive that captures intent, observation, and inference as first-class queryable fields on every step, alongside versioned plans with revision rationale, evidence chains, structured verdicts with confidence scores, and delegation authority chains. We formalize the distinction between computational state persistence and reasoning provenance, argue that the latter cannot in general be faithfully reconstructed from the former, and show how AERs enable population-level behavioral analytics: reasoning pattern mining, confidence calibration, cross-agent comparison, and counterfactual regression testing via mock replay. We present a domain-agnostic model with extensible domain profiles, a reference implementation and SDK, and outline an evaluation methodology informed by preliminary deployment on a production platformized root cause analysis agent.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning Provenance for Autonomous AI Agents: Structured Behavioral Analytics Beyond State Checkpoints and Execution Traces
Vispute, Neelmani
Kadam, Aditya
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Software Engineering
D.2.5; I.2.1
As AI agents transition from human-supervised copilots to autonomous platform infrastructure, the ability to analyze their reasoning behavior across populations of investigations becomes a pressing infrastructure requirement. Existing operational tooling addresses adjacent needs effectively: state checkpoint systems enable fault tolerance; observability platforms provide execution traces for debugging; telemetry standards ensure interoperability. What current systems do not natively provide as a first-class, schema-level primitive is structured reasoning provenance -- normalized, queryable records of why the agent chose each action, what it concluded from each observation, how each conclusion shaped its strategy, and which evidence supports its final verdict. This paper introduces the Agent Execution Record (AER), a structured reasoning provenance primitive that captures intent, observation, and inference as first-class queryable fields on every step, alongside versioned plans with revision rationale, evidence chains, structured verdicts with confidence scores, and delegation authority chains. We formalize the distinction between computational state persistence and reasoning provenance, argue that the latter cannot in general be faithfully reconstructed from the former, and show how AERs enable population-level behavioral analytics: reasoning pattern mining, confidence calibration, cross-agent comparison, and counterfactual regression testing via mock replay. We present a domain-agnostic model with extensible domain profiles, a reference implementation and SDK, and outline an evaluation methodology informed by preliminary deployment on a production platformized root cause analysis agent.
title Reasoning Provenance for Autonomous AI Agents: Structured Behavioral Analytics Beyond State Checkpoints and Execution Traces
topic Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Software Engineering
D.2.5; I.2.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21692