[2603.21152] TRACE: A Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Physical Reasoning in Seismological Science

Physics > Geophysics arXiv:2603.21152 (physics) [Submitted on 22 Mar 2026] Title:TRACE: A Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Physical Reasoning in Seismological Science Authors:Feng Liu, Jian Xu, Xin Cui, Xinghao Wang, Zijie Guo, Jiong Wang, S. Mostafa Mousavi, Xinyu Gu, Hao Chen, Ben Fei, Lihua Fang, Fenghua Ling, Zefeng Li, Lei Bai View a PDF of the paper titled TRACE: A Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Physical Reasoning in Seismological Science, by Feng Liu and 13 other authors View PDF Abstract:Inferring the physical mechanisms that govern earthquake sequences from indirect geophysical observations remains difficult, particularly across tectonically distinct environments where similar seismic patterns can reflect different underlying processes. Current interpretations rely heavily on the expert synthesis of catalogs, spatiotemporal statistics, and candidate physical models, limiting reproducibility and the systematic transfer of insight across settings. Here we present TRACE (Trans-perspective Reasoning and Automated Comprehensive Evaluator), a multi-agent system that combines large language model planning with formal seismological constraints to derive auditable, physically grounded mechanistic inference from raw observations. Applied to the 2019 Ridgecrest sequence, TRACE autonomously identifies stress-perturbation-induced delayed triggering, resolving the cascading interaction between the Mw 6.4 and Mw 7.1 mainshocks; in the Santorini-Kolumbo case, the system ident...