Contract-Centered Architecture for Scalable and Manageable Agentic Runtimes
Yaxiao Liu, Pengbo Liu, Yiwen Liu, Yihua Guan, Zhenghe Hou, Jiaxing Song · Read the paper
Hook: Instead of treating agent deployment as a single-task benchmark problem, the paper frames it as a coordination and accountability problem across enterprise teams.
Summary: The paper proposes a contract-centered architecture for enterprise agentic runtimes built around four responsibility objects: Skill, Harness, Scaffold, and an independently governed data substrate. It also defines a falsifiable hypothesis and randomized crossover protocol to test whether capability changes can remain separable from capacity changes under declared operating conditions.
Industry impact: For organizations deploying agents, the architecture offers explicit boundaries for reusable capabilities, runtime governance, execution controls, and data stewardship. The paper reports no completed implementation, experiment, dataset, or measured result, so its practical effectiveness remains to be evaluated.
Potential implications: Teams adopting this approach would need to define ownership, versioning, admission controls, evidence requirements, and enforcement budgets for the proposed responsibility objects. The proposed four-state verdict—supported, falsified, conditional-engineering, or inconclusive—could provide a structured way to communicate validation outcomes once experiments are conducted.
