Causal-Temporal Event Graphs: A Formal Model for Recursive Agent Execution Traces

TL;DR

This paper introduces causal-temporal event graphs (CTEGs) as a formal model for recursive agent execution traces, capturing causal and temporal relationships with potential applications in verification and data management.

Contribution

It formalizes CTEGs as a recursive hierarchy of finite, well-structured execution traces with properties supporting compositionality, robustness, and cryptographic verification.

Findings

CTEGs form a hierarchy converging at a least fixed point.

Stabilization occurs at the first level if subagent traces are opaque.

Supports compositional, tamper-evident, and database-compatible execution modeling.

Abstract

We introduce causal-temporal event graphs (CTEGs) as a formal model for fully resolved recursive agent execution records under single-parenthood causal semantics. We formalise direct event emissions and recursive subagent invocations as extension procedures on generic typed temporal graphs and show that the recursive closure $\mathscr{E}_\infty$ of the induced maximal dynamics starting from single causal roots consists entirely of finite sequences of CTEGs. A CTEG is a rooted arborescence whose nodes carry timestamps and event types, subject to the constraint that timestamps be strictly increasing along causal paths. We realise $\mathscr{E}_\infty$ as the increasing union of a recursive hierarchy $\mathscr{E}_0 \subseteq \mathscr{E}_1 \subseteq \cdots$ of agent execution levels parametrised by recursion depth, which is recognised as the ascending Kleene chain of a monotone operator $\varphi$ admitting $\mathscr{E}_\infty$ as its least fixed point. Although the introduction of the full hierarchy is natural, stabilisation occurs already at $\mathscr{E}_1$ if one insists that the internal construction of a subagent execution trace be a delegated and opaque computational unit. The CTEG formalism supports compositional construction of globally well-formed execution traces from local agent behaviour without centralised coordination, preserves well-formedness under partial execution failure, and admits a natural relational database encoding. The arborescent structure of CTEGs is further compatible with cryptographic Merkle tree commitments for tamper-evident session verification.