为让智能代理系统可问责,必须全程追踪其决策来源。
Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance

- 提出显式溯源机制,贯穿智能体全生命周期。
- 首次定义责任张量与因果归因函数,实现责任量化。
- 适用于监管者、开发者,确保事故可追溯可干预。
智能代理系统正快速渗透至软件工程等现实领域,但公众信任未能同步提升。根本原因在于责任仍属主观且无法强制执行——当前框架无法生成可量化、可追溯、可干预的溯源信息,以在多方协作导致损害时明确责任归属。本文主张,问题不在评测标准,而在于缺乏贯穿智能体全生命周期的显式溯源。为此,从四个维度推进:阐明溯源在社会技术层面的责任缺口;形式化溯源需包含的内容(因果归因函数与责任张量);验证溯源在四个生命周期层中可计算、可在线干预;通过具体事件分析责任主体。显式溯源不是可选优化,而是负责任智能代理系统的必要前提,所有利益相关方均不可忽视。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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.
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