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

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] When Only the Final Text Survives: Implicit Execution Tracing for Multi-Agent Attribution Yi Nian, Haosen Cao, Shenzhe Zhu, Henry Peng Zou, Qingqing Luan, Yue Zhao When a multi-agent system produces an incorrect or harmful answer, who is accountable if execution logs and agent identifiers are unavailable? Multi-agent language systems increasingly rely on structured interactions such as delegation and iterative refinement, yet the final output often obscures the underlying interaction topology and agent contributions. We introduce IET (Implicit Execution Tracing), a metadata-independent framework that enables token-level attribution directly from generated text and a simple mechanism for interaction topology reconstruction. During generation, agent-specific keyed signals are embedded into the token distribution, transforming the text into a self-describing execution trace detectable only with a secret key. At detection time, a transition-aware scoring method identifies agent handover points and reconstructs the interaction graph. Experiments show that IET recovers agent segments and coordination structure with high accuracy while preserving generation quality, enabling privacy-preserving auditing for multi-agent language systems. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2603.17445 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.17445v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.17445 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yi Nian [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:34:51 UTC (1,425 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)