[2603.17445] When Only the Final Text Survives: Implicit Execution Tracing for Multi-Agent Attribution

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.17445 (cs) [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026 (v1), last revised 31 Mar 2026 (this version, v3)] Title:When Only the Final Text Survives: Implicit Execution Tracing for Multi-Agent Attribution Authors:Yi Nian, Haosen Cao, Shenzhe Zhu, Henry Peng Zou, Qingqing Luan, Yue Zhao View a PDF of the paper titled When Only the Final Text Survives: Implicit Execution Tracing for Multi-Agent Attribution, by Yi Nian and 5 other authors View PDF Abstract:When a multi-agent system produces an incorrect or harmful answer, who is accountable if execution logs and agent identifiers are unavailable? In practice, generated content is often detached from its execution environment due to privacy or system boundaries, leaving the final text as the only auditable artifact. Existing attribution methods rely on full execution traces and thus become ineffective in such metadata-deprived settings. We propose Implicit Execution Tracing (IET), a provenance-by-design framework that shifts attribution from post-hoc inference to built-in instrumentation. Instead of reconstructing hidden trajectories, IET embeds agent-specific, key-conditioned statistical signals directly into the token generation process, transforming the output text into a self-verifying execution record. At inference time, we recover a linearized execution trace from the final text via transition-aware statistical scoring. Experiments across diverse multi-agent coordination settings demonstr...