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arxiv: 2605.17169 · v1 · pith:TNEOYDE4new · submitted 2026-05-16 · 💻 cs.AI · cs.CL· cs.MA

Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance

Jinwei Hu , Xinmiao Huang , Qisong He , Youcheng Sun , Yi Dong , Xiaowei Huang This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-20 14:03 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.AI cs.CLcs.MA
keywords agentic AIprovenanceresponsibility attributioncausal attributionAI lifecycleAI safetymulti-agent systemsaccountability
0
0 comments X

The pith

Explicit provenance across the full agentic lifecycle is the necessary condition for making responsibility in AI computable and actionable.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper establishes that agentic AI is spreading into domains like software engineering while public trust lags because responsibility stays subjective when harms arise from compositions no single party designed. Current frameworks produce no quantifiable, traceable, or interventionable records that would let stakeholders assign accountability. The authors argue that embedding explicit provenance throughout the lifecycle supplies the missing structural basis, allowing responsibility to shift from discussion to computation via formal mechanisms and practical implementation across layers.

Core claim

Explicit provenance is not optional but the necessary condition for responsible agentic AI, as only it supplies the quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable data needed to assign responsibility when harm emerges from agent compositions no single party designed.

What carries the argument

Explicit provenance, encoded through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor and maintained across four lifecycle layers to support online estimation and intervention.

If this is right

  • Responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions become identifiable once provenance records are available.
  • Provenance becomes estimable and interveneable online in preliminary experiments before irreversible harm accumulates.
  • A concrete agentic incident can be analyzed to determine which parties bear responsibility.
  • No stakeholder in the agentic AI ecosystem can treat explicit provenance as discretionary.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Mandates for provenance logging could emerge in future AI regulations to enforce accountability.
  • Performance or privacy costs of maintaining detailed provenance would need separate measurement in deployed systems.
  • The same traceability approach might apply to harms in non-agentic AI that involve chained decisions.
  • Automated tools for real-time responsibility scoring could be built on top of the proposed tensor.

Load-bearing premise

That current agentic systems generate no usable provenance today and that adding explicit provenance will directly render responsibility computable without extra mechanisms or major trade-offs.

What would settle it

A concrete multi-agent incident in which full explicit provenance is recorded yet responsibility for resulting harm still cannot be assigned to any stakeholder or intervened upon before damage occurs.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.17169 by Jinwei Hu, Qisong He, Xiaowei Huang, Xinmiao Huang, Yi Dong, Youcheng Sun.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Per-component trustworthy AI audits components in isolation ( [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p002_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Online causal signal is estimable from agent execution prefixes, supporting required properties for responsible agent. AUPRC measures how well a monitor identifies failing trajectories before harm materializes. NeSy monitors substantially outperform random and zero-shot LLM baselines. We report preliminary experi￾ments targeting the L2 with detailed implementation de￾tails in Appendix A, where online prove… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Agentic AI is rapidly proliferating across diverse real-world domains such as software engineering, yet public trust has not kept pace. The central reason is that responsibility, despite being widely discussed, remains a subjective and unenforced concept, as no current agentic framework produces the quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance needed to assign it when harm emerges from compositions no single party designed. We position that what is missing is not better benchmark-level evaluation but $\textbf{explicit provenance}$ across the full agentic lifecycle, which is the only viable basis for making responsibility computable and actionable. We advance this agenda along four axes: establishing $\textit{why}$ such provenance is a structural necessity by identifying responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions, formalizing $\textit{what}$ it must encode through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, discussing $\textit{how}$ it can be made computable across four lifecycle layers with preliminary experiments showing that provenance is estimable and interveneable online before irreversible harm accumulates, and examining $\textit{who}$ bears responsibility through a concrete agentic incident. Explicit provenance is not a discretionary refinement but the necessary condition for responsible agentic AI, and no stakeholder across its ecosystem can afford to treat it as optional.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

3 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript claims that current agentic AI frameworks fail to produce quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance, leaving responsibility subjective and unenforced when harm emerges from compositions with no single designer. It positions explicit provenance across the full lifecycle as the necessary condition for making responsibility computable, formalized via a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor. The work advances this via four axes: sociotechnical responsibility gaps, formal encoding, computability across four lifecycle layers (with preliminary experiments on online estimability and interveneability), and illustration through a concrete agentic incident.

Significance. If the proposed provenance structures can be shown to suffice without unstated mechanisms or prohibitive trade-offs, the framework could provide a concrete basis for accountability in multi-agent systems, addressing a core barrier to trust in deployed agentic AI. The four-axis structure offers a useful organizing agenda, and the preliminary experiments on estimability provide an initial empirical foothold.

major comments (3)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract and central positioning paragraph: the claim that explicit provenance is 'the only viable basis for making responsibility computable' is load-bearing yet rests on the unverified premise that the causal attribution function and responsibility tensor suffice for emergent interactions in compositions with no single designer; the cited preliminary experiments demonstrate estimability and interveneability but do not test generalization or elimination of supplementary causal assumptions.
  2. [Formalization section] Formalization of the responsibility tensor and causal attribution function (in the 'what' axis section): these constructs risk circularity because they appear defined primarily with reference to the desired responsibility outcomes rather than independent external benchmarks or falsifiable criteria, which weakens the assertion that they render responsibility computable.
  3. [Lifecycle layers section] Discussion of computability across four lifecycle layers (in the 'how' axis section): while preliminary experiments are reported as showing online estimability and interveneability before irreversible harm, the manuscript does not examine scalability limits, performance/privacy trade-offs, or additional mechanisms needed when harm arises from agent interactions, leaving the necessity claim under-supported.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Notation and definitions] The introduction of novel terms such as 'responsibility tensor' would be clarified by an explicit comparison to related concepts in causal inference and data provenance literature.
  2. [Incident analysis] Ensure the concrete agentic incident example includes sufficient detail on the four lifecycle layers to allow readers to trace the provenance encoding.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

3 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their insightful comments, which have helped us identify areas for improvement in the manuscript. We address each of the major comments point by point below, providing clarifications and indicating planned revisions where necessary.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract and central positioning paragraph: the claim that explicit provenance is 'the only viable basis for making responsibility computable' is load-bearing yet rests on the unverified premise that the causal attribution function and responsibility tensor suffice for emergent interactions in compositions with no single designer; the cited preliminary experiments demonstrate estimability and interveneability but do not test generalization or elimination of supplementary causal assumptions.

    Authors: The manuscript argues that explicit provenance is necessary due to the structural responsibility gaps in existing agentic AI systems, as detailed in the 'why' axis. The causal attribution function draws from established causal inference methods, and the responsibility tensor provides a formal structure for aggregation. While we recognize that the preliminary experiments are limited and do not fully test generalization across all emergent interactions, the claim is positioned as a necessary condition rather than a complete sufficiency proof. We will revise the abstract to clarify this distinction and add a new subsection on assumptions and limitations to better support the positioning. revision: partial

  2. Referee: [Formalization section] Formalization of the responsibility tensor and causal attribution function (in the 'what' axis section): these constructs risk circularity because they appear defined primarily with reference to the desired responsibility outcomes rather than independent external benchmarks or falsifiable criteria, which weakens the assertion that they render responsibility computable.

    Authors: We maintain that the formalization avoids circularity. The causal attribution function is specified using interventionist causal models (e.g., via do-operators on agent interaction graphs), which are defined independently of responsibility outcomes. The responsibility tensor then operationalizes these attributions into a computable form. To prevent any misinterpretation of circularity, we will include additional explanations linking to falsifiable criteria from causal discovery literature and external benchmarks in the revised formalization section. revision: yes

  3. Referee: [Lifecycle layers section] Discussion of computability across four lifecycle layers (in the 'how' axis section): while preliminary experiments are reported as showing online estimability and interveneability before irreversible harm, the manuscript does not examine scalability limits, performance/privacy trade-offs, or additional mechanisms needed when harm arises from agent interactions, leaving the necessity claim under-supported.

    Authors: We agree with this observation. The current experiments focus on demonstrating basic online estimability and interveneability in controlled settings. The manuscript does not delve into scalability or specific trade-offs, which are indeed important for real-world applicability, especially in multi-agent scenarios. We will revise the 'how' axis to include an expanded discussion of these aspects, potential performance and privacy implications, and proposed mechanisms for handling emergent interactions, along with directions for future empirical work. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity in the derivation chain

full rationale

The paper identifies gaps in current agentic frameworks (no quantifiable/traceable/interventionable provenance for harm from multi-party compositions) and positions explicit provenance as the necessary condition for making responsibility computable. It advances this via sociotechnical analysis, formalization through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, lifecycle-layer discussion, and a concrete incident example. No equations, self-citations, or definitions are present in the provided text that reduce the central claim to its inputs by construction (e.g., no fitted parameter renamed as prediction, no self-definitional loop where the tensor is defined solely in terms of computability). The formal constructs are introduced as an independent proposal rather than a renaming or self-referential fit. The argument remains self-contained against external benchmarks of responsibility gaps and does not rely on load-bearing self-citation chains or ansatzes smuggled from prior work.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 2 invented entities

The paper rests on the domain assumption that no current framework produces the required provenance and introduces new constructs without independent evidence or derivations from external benchmarks.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Current agentic frameworks produce no quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance for responsibility assignment.
    Stated as the central reason public trust has not kept pace with proliferation.
invented entities (2)
  • responsibility tensor no independent evidence
    purpose: To formalize what provenance must encode for computable responsibility.
    Introduced in the what axis as part of the formalization.
  • causal attribution function no independent evidence
    purpose: To enable attribution across agent compositions for responsibility.
    Defined alongside the responsibility tensor in the formalization step.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5759 in / 1304 out tokens · 45270 ms · 2026-05-20T14:03:28.130644+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

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