TRACE: An Operational Reasoning Schema for Auditable Agentic Commitments
This paper defines TRACE (Typed Reasoning And Commitment Evidence): a typed, versioned schema for recording reasoning traces, a reference procedure for writing records against it, and one operating discipline, no durable state change without a record. The paper argues in three layers that reasoning is not in the language model: the autoregressive mechanism natively computes association; chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning inherit its limits; and the formal constructs of reasoning theory, from Socratic procedure to Pearl's ladder, are absent as machinery. The schema answers the absence with fields and tests: the TraceRecord and its causal specialization, an eight-stage reference wr...
| Authors | Edward Y. Chang, Emily J. Chang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 14 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 July 2026 |
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