Resume Means Resume: A Machine-Checked Conformance Contract for Checkpoint, Interrupt, and Resume Semantics in Workflow Persistence Layers
A framework that persists execution state so a run can be interrupted, survive a crash, and continue must decide what a resume means for effects that already happened. Five widely deployed agent workflow frameworks answer differently, none exposes a machine-checkable contract, and measured behavior violates even the fragments they state. The RESUME CONTRACT states six properties over the persistence API (prefix continuation, effect exactly-once, fork determinism, checkpoint validity, consume-once, recovery determinism), plus fork-intent and liveness obligations. A TLA+ model checks a reference semantics exhaustively, unchanged at scaled bounds (7.4 million states), and the reference conju...
| Authors | Sajjad Khan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
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