arXiv subjects

Lior Limonad

Publications and source records attributed to Lior Limonad.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Using Process Mining to Generate AI Agents from Software Engineering Process Records

Integrating AI agents into Software Engineering (SE) raises an important challenge: how can we specify and realize AI agents that work effectively alongside humans in hybrid SE teams? Determining the right granularity and separation of concerns for such agents is non-trivial. Coarse-grained agents may introduce unmanageable complexity, whereas micro-agents may create severe coordination overhead. Moreover, existing multi-agent SE frameworks typically rely on predefined role structures and do not account for project-specific characteristics or process adaptations. We address this by combining object-centric, imperative, and declarative process mining. Using event logs extracted from software repositories, our approach discovers project-specific agent roles using a predefined SE role vocabulary grounded in repository behavior and generates matching agent specifications and implementations. As proof-of-concept, we applied our approach to a well-established open-source project. We performed functional tests and an exploratory user study to determine how well the generated AI agent specifications are aligned with human expectations.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

A Process Harness for Uplifting Legacy Workflows to Agentic BPM: Design and Realization in CUGA FLO

We introduce the process harness, a new mechanism for uplifting legacy workflows into Agentic Business Process Management (Agentic BPM) without replacing the underlying workflow engine. A process harness places a policy-governed agentic layer around a deterministic workflow engine, intercepting designated control points to contribute reasoning, adaptation, and oversight while the engine retains structural authority over the process. To define the process harness rigorously, we develop the Task-Decision-Flow (TDF) model, specifying both its data schema and its execution semantics. TDF decomposes LLM reasoning across three policy-governed agent types: a TaskAgent for knowledge-intensive task execution, a DecisionAgent for per-case gateway routing, and a FlowAgent that governs runtime flow adaptation through a principled hook mechanism. Each agent reasons within an explicit policy drawn from the process FRAME, the aggregate policy set governing all LLM calls in the system. We then present CUGA FLO as the design and implementation realization of the TDF model, and demonstrate it on a loan approval workflow that exercises all three agent types and hook-driven regulatory override. The process harness uniquely reconciles imperative requirements, realized through deterministic workflow execution that enforces structural compliance, with normative requirements, realized through policy-framed agentic autonomy invoked at designated control points wherever the process demands it.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Agent Mentor: Framing Agent Knowledge through Semantic Trajectory Analysis

AI agent development relies heavily on natural language prompting to define agents' tasks, knowledge, and goals. These prompts are interpreted by Large Language Models (LLMs), which govern agent behavior. Consequently, agentic performance is susceptible to variability arising from imprecise or ambiguous prompt formulations. Identifying and correcting such issues requires examining not only the agent's code, but also the internal system prompts generated throughout its execution lifecycle, as reflected in execution logs. In this work, we introduce an analytics pipeline implemented as part of the Agent Mentor open-source library that monitors and incrementally adapts the system prompts defining another agent's behavior. The pipeline improves performance by systematically injecting corrective instructions into the agent's knowledge. We describe its underlying mechanism, with particular emphasis on identifying semantic features associated with undesired behaviors and using them to derive corrective statements. We evaluate the proposed pipeline across three exemplar agent configurations and benchmark tasks using repeated execution runs to assess effectiveness. These experiments provide an initial exploration of automating such a mentoring pipeline within future agentic governance frameworks. Overall, the approach demonstrates consistent and measurable accuracy improvements across diverse configurations, particularly in settings dominated by specification ambiguity. For reproducibility, we released our code as open source under the Agent Mentor library.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Business Process Management: A Research Manifesto

This paper presents a manifesto that articulates the conceptual foundations of Agentic Business Process Management (APM), an extension of Business Process Management (BPM) for governing autonomous agents executing processes in organizations. From a management perspective, APM represents a paradigm shift from the traditional process view of the business process, driven by the realization of process awareness and an agent-oriented abstraction, where software and human agents act as primary functional entities that perceive, reason, and act within explicit process frames. This perspective marks a shift from traditional, automation-oriented BPM toward systems in which autonomy is constrained, aligned, and made operational through process awareness. We introduce the core abstractions and architectural elements required to realize APM systems and elaborate on four key capabilities that such APM agents must support: framed autonomy, explainability, conversational actionability, and self-modification. These capabilities jointly ensure that agents' goals are aligned with organizational goals and that agents behave in a framed yet proactive manner in pursuing those goals. We discuss the extent to which the capabilities can be realized and identify research challenges whose resolution requires further advances in BPM, AI, and multi-agent systems. The manifesto thus serves as a roadmap for bridging these communities and for guiding the development of APM systems in practice.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

XABPs: Towards eXplainable Autonomous Business Processes

Autonomous business processes (ABPs), i.e., self-executing workflows leveraging AI/ML, have the potential to improve operational efficiency, reduce errors, lower costs, improve response times, and free human workers for more strategic and creative work. However, ABPs may raise specific concerns including decreased stakeholder trust, difficulties in debugging, hindered accountability, risk of bias, and issues with regulatory compliance. We argue for eXplainable ABPs (XABPs) to address these concerns by enabling systems to articulate their rationale. The paper outlines a systematic approach to XABPs, characterizing their forms, structuring explainability, and identifying key BPM research challenges towards XABPs.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

The WHY in Business Processes: Unification of Causal Process Models

Causal reasoning is essential for business process interventions and improvement, requiring a clear understanding of causal relationships among activity execution times in an event log. Recent work introduced a method for discovering causal process models but lacked the ability to capture alternating causal conditions across multiple variants. This raises the challenges of handling missing values and expressing the alternating conditions among log splits when blending traces with varying activities. We propose a novel method to unify multiple causal process variants into a consistent model that preserves the correctness of the original causal models, while explicitly representing their causal-flow alternations. The method is formally defined, proved, evaluated on three open and two proprietary datasets, and released as an open-source implementation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Agentic AI Process Observability: Discovering Behavioral Variability

AI agents that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming core building blocks of modern software systems. A wide range of frameworks is now available to support the specification of such applications. These frameworks enable the definition of agent setups using natural language prompting, which specifies the roles, goals, and tools assigned to the various agents involved. Within such setups, agent behavior is non-deterministic for any given input, highlighting the critical need for robust debugging and observability tools. In this work, we explore the use of process and causal discovery applied to agent execution trajectories as a means of enhancing developer observability. This approach aids in monitoring and understanding the emergent variability in agent behavior. Additionally, we complement this with LLM-based static analysis techniques to distinguish between intended and unintended behavioral variability. We argue that such instrumentation is essential for giving developers greater control over evolving specifications and for identifying aspects of functionality that may require more precise and explicit definitions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Selecting the Right LLM for eGov Explanations

The perceived quality of the explanations accompanying e-government services is key to gaining trust in these institutions, consequently amplifying further usage of these services. Recent advances in generative AI, and concretely in Large Language Models (LLMs) allow the automation of such content articulations, eliciting explanations' interpretability and fidelity, and more generally, adapting content to various audiences. However, selecting the right LLM type for this has become a non-trivial task for e-government service providers. In this work, we adapted a previously developed scale to assist with this selection, providing a systematic approach for the comparative analysis of the perceived quality of explanations generated by various LLMs. We further demonstrated its applicability through the tax-return process, using it as an exemplar use case that could benefit from employing an LLM to generate explanations about tax refund decisions. This was attained through a user study with 128 survey respondents who were asked to rate different versions of LLM-generated explanations about tax refund decisions, providing a methodological basis for selecting the most appropriate LLM. Recognizing the practical challenges of conducting such a survey, we also began exploring the automation of this process by attempting to replicate human feedback using a selection of cutting-edge predictive techniques.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Monetizing Currency Pair Sentiments through LLM Explainability

Large language models (LLMs) play a vital role in almost every domain in today's organizations. In the context of this work, we highlight the use of LLMs for sentiment analysis (SA) and explainability. Specifically, we contribute a novel technique to leverage LLMs as a post-hoc model-independent tool for the explainability of SA. We applied our technique in the financial domain for currency-pair price predictions using open news feed data merged with market prices. Our application shows that the developed technique is not only a viable alternative to using conventional eXplainable AI but can also be fed back to enrich the input to the machine learning (ML) model to better predict future currency-pair values. We envision our results could be generalized to employing explainability as a conventional enrichment for ML input for better ML predictions in general.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Towards a Benchmark for Causal Business Process Reasoning with LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for boosting organizational efficiency and automating tasks. While not originally designed for complex cognitive processes, recent efforts have further extended to employ LLMs in activities such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making. In business processes, such abilities could be invaluable for leveraging on the massive corpora LLMs have been trained on for gaining deep understanding of such processes. In this work, we plant the seeds for the development of a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to reason about causal and process perspectives of business operations. We refer to this view as Causally-augmented Business Processes (BP^C). The core of the benchmark comprises a set of BP^C related situations, a set of questions about these situations, and a set of deductive rules employed to systematically resolve the ground truth answers to these questions. Also with the power of LLMs, the seed is then instantiated into a larger-scale set of domain-specific situations and questions. Reasoning on BP^C is of crucial importance for process interventions and process improvement. Our benchmark, accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm/BPC, can be used in one of two possible modalities: testing the performance of any target LLM and training an LLM to advance its capability to reason about BP^C.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

How well can a large language model explain business processes as perceived by users?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of text to interpret and generate human-like textual content. They are becoming a vital vehicle in realizing the vision of the autonomous enterprise, with organizations today actively adopting LLMs to automate many aspects of their operations. LLMs are likely to play a prominent role in future AI-augmented business process management systems, catering functionalities across all system lifecycle stages. One such system's functionality is Situation-Aware eXplainability (SAX), which relates to generating causally sound and human-interpretable explanations. In this paper, we present the SAX4BPM framework developed to generate SAX explanations. The SAX4BPM suite consists of a set of services and a central knowledge repository. The functionality of these services is to elicit the various knowledge ingredients that underlie SAX explanations. A key innovative component among these ingredients is the causal process execution view. In this work, we integrate the framework with an LLM to leverage its power to synthesize the various input ingredients for the sake of improved SAX explanations. Since the use of LLMs for SAX is also accompanied by a certain degree of doubt related to its capacity to adequately fulfill SAX along with its tendency for hallucination and lack of inherent capacity to reason, we pursued a methodological evaluation of the perceived quality of the generated explanations. We developed a designated scale and conducted a rigorous user study. Our findings show that the input presented to the LLMs aided with the guard-railing of its performance, yielding SAX explanations having better-perceived fidelity. This improvement is moderated by the perception of trust and curiosity. More so, this improvement comes at the cost of the perceived interpretability of the explanation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Toward Methodical Discovery and Handling of Hidden Assumptions in Complex Systems and Models

Methodologies for development of complex systems and models include external reviews by domain and technology experts. Among others, such reviews can uncover undocumented built-in assumptions that may be critical for correct and safe operation or constrain applicability. Since such assumptions may still escape human-centered processes like reviews, agile development, and risk analyses, here, we contribute toward making this process more methodical and automatable. We first present a blueprint for a taxonomy and formalization of the problem. We then show that a variety of digital artifacts of the system or model can be automatically checked against extensive reference knowledge. Since mimicking the breadth and depth of knowledge and skills of experts may appear unattainable, we illustrate the basic feasibility of automation with rudimentary experiments using OpenAI's ChatGPT. We believe that systematic handling of this aspect of system engineering can contribute significantly to the quality and safety of complex systems and models, and to the efficiency of development projects. We dedicate this work to Werner Damm, whose contributions to modeling and model-based development, in industry and academia, with a special focus on safety, helped establish a solid foundation to our discipline and to the work of many scientists and professionals, including, naturally, the approaches and techniques described here.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies

Unraveling the causal relationships among the execution of process activities is a crucial element in predicting the consequences of process interventions and making informed decisions regarding process improvements. Process discovery algorithms exploit time precedence as their main source of model derivation. Hence, a causal view can supplement process discovery, being a new perspective in which relations reflect genuine cause-effect dependencies among the tasks. This calls for faithful new techniques to discover the causal execution dependencies among the tasks in the process. To this end, our work offers a systematic approach to the unveiling of the causal business process by leveraging an existing causal discovery algorithm over activity timing. In addition, this work delves into a set of conditions under which process mining discovery algorithms generate a model that is incongruent with the causal business process model, and shows how the latter model can be methodologically employed for a sound analysis of the process. Our methodology searches for such discrepancies between the two models in the context of three causal patterns, and derives a new view in which these inconsistencies are annotated over the mined process model. We demonstrate our methodology employing two open process mining algorithms, the IBM Process Mining tool, and the LiNGAM causal discovery technique. We apply it to a synthesized dataset and two open benchmark datasets.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Mimicking the Maestro: Exploring the Efficacy of a Virtual AI Teacher in Fine Motor Skill Acquisition

Motor skills, especially fine motor skills like handwriting, play an essential role in academic pursuits and everyday life. Traditional methods to teach these skills, although effective, can be time-consuming and inconsistent. With the rise of advanced technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, there is increasing interest in automating such teaching processes using these technologies, via human-robot and human-computer interactions. In this study, we examine the potential of a virtual AI teacher in emulating the techniques of human educators for motor skill acquisition. We introduce an AI teacher model that captures the distinct characteristics of human instructors. Using a Reinforcement Learning environment tailored to mimic teacher-learner interactions, we tested our AI model against four guiding hypotheses, emphasizing improved learner performance, enhanced rate of skill acquisition, and reduced variability in learning outcomes. Our findings, validated on synthetic learners, revealed significant improvements across all tested hypotheses. Notably, our model showcased robustness across different learners and settings and demonstrated adaptability to handwriting. This research underscores the potential of integrating Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning models with robotics in revolutionizing the teaching of critical motor skills.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Ongoing Tracking of Engagement in Motor Learning

Teaching motor skills such as playing music, handwriting, and driving, can greatly benefit from recently developed technologies such as wearable gloves for haptic feedback or robotic sensorimotor exoskeletons for the mediation of effective human-human and robot-human physical interactions. At the heart of such teacher-learner interactions still stands the critical role of the ongoing feedback a teacher can get about the student's engagement state during the learning and practice sessions. Particularly for motor learning, such feedback is an essential functionality in a system that is developed to guide a teacher on how to control the intensity of the physical interaction, and to best adapt it to the gradually evolving performance of the learner. In this paper, our focus is on the development of a near real-time machine-learning model that can acquire its input from a set of readily available, noninvasive, privacy-preserving, body-worn sensors, for the benefit of tracking the engagement of the learner in the motor task. We used the specific case of violin playing as a target domain in which data were empirically acquired, the latent construct of engagement in motor learning was carefully developed for data labeling, and a machine-learning model was rigorously trained and validated.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

AI-Augmented Business Process Management Systems: A Research Manifesto

AI-Augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems, empowered by trustworthy AI technology. An ABPMS enhances the execution of business processes with the aim of making these processes more adaptable, proactive, explainable, and context-sensitive. This manifesto presents a vision for ABPMSs and discusses research challenges that need to be surmounted to realize this vision. To this end, we define the concept of ABPMS, we outline the lifecycle of processes within an ABPMS, we discuss core characteristics of an ABPMS, and we derive a set of challenges to realize systems with these characteristics.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Expecting the Unexpected: Developing Autonomous-System Design Principles for Reacting to Unpredicted Events and Conditions

When developing autonomous systems, engineers and other stakeholders make great effort to prepare the system for all foreseeable events and conditions. However, these systems are still bound to encounter events and conditions that were not considered at design time. For reasons like safety, cost, or ethics, it is often highly desired that these new situations be handled correctly upon first encounter. In this paper we first justify our position that there will always exist unpredicted events and conditions, driven among others by: new inventions in the real world; the diversity of world-wide system deployments and uses; and, the non-negligible probability that multiple seemingly unlikely events, which may be neglected at design time, will not only occur, but occur together. We then argue that despite this unpredictability property, handling these events and conditions is indeed possible. Hence, we offer and exemplify design principles that when applied in advance, can enable systems to deal, in the future, with unpredicted circumstances. We conclude with a discussion of how this work and a broader theoretical study of the unexpected can contribute toward a foundation of engineering principles for developing trustworthy next-generation autonomous systems.

cs.SE↗