From Trajectories to Evidence: Auditable Experimental Records for Industrial Research Agents

2026-08-05

AI Summary

Industrial research agents often generate experimental trajectories containing invalid or incomplete information, rendering them unreliable for direct decision-making. This work proposes an evidence-oriented framework that automatically transforms such trajectories into structured evidence through a context-isolated generate–verify–repair pipeline. The approach introduces intervention-level claim categorization—distinguishing actionable repairs, diagnostic safeguards, and retained discoveries—and incorporates end-to-end provenance tracking to enable claim scoping and auditability. Experimental results demonstrate that the resulting candidate solutions outperform existing baselines. Audits further reveal that trajectory evolution is non-monotonic, and that applicability assessment constitutes a key performance bottleneck for the controller.

Abstract

Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions. Yet a completed trajectory is not automatically evidence: generated artifacts may be unsupported or incomplete, executed rounds may be invalid or confounded, and later modifications may obscure earlier findings. We study \textbf{trajectory-to-evidence conversion}, asking what a completed research process has actually established. We introduce an evidence-grounded framework that couples bounded verification of consequential artifacts with post-execution claim qualification. A context-isolated generate--verify--repair process checks artifacts for evidence violations and missing downstream requirements before release. After execution, validity and attribution checks consolidate evidence across rounds, qualify intervention-level claims as actionable repairs, diagnostic guards, or withheld findings, and preserve admitted claims as auditable records with explicit provenance and applicability boundaries. A hybrid LLM-assisted controller subsequently applies, defers, or rejects records based on available target evidence. Record audits characterize which claims survive qualification, while downstream diagnostics identify affirmative applicability judgment as a bottleneck for the tested controller. Across paper-to-target adaptations, later rounds often improve on the first, while final rounds frequently underperform an earlier best, exposing non-monotonic trajectory evolution. Candidates produced through the complete workflow also yielded positive online lifts relative to deployed baselines.

Problem

• trajectory-to-evidence conversion
• auditable records
• research agents
• evidence validation
• industrial machine learning

Innovation

• trajectory-to-evidence conversion
• auditable records
• generate-verify-repair
• claim qualification
• LLM-assisted controller