Principle:Diagram of thought Diagram of thought Trace Report Generation

Overview

Trace Report Generation is the process of generating human-readable and machine-parseable reports from structured reasoning traces for auditing, debugging, and verification. The approach is library-agnostic: reports may be produced using any visualization or serialization tooling, with the principle focusing on what is reported rather than how it is rendered.

Description

The final step in trace extraction transforms the analyzed Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) into actionable reports. Reports include:

• Visual graph renderings — faithful depictions of the DAG structure showing nodes, edges, roles, and validation status.
• Path statistics — quantitative summaries such as total nodes, validated/invalidated counts, branching factor, and critical-path length.
• Validation summaries — aggregated pass/fail information drawn from @status records.
• Reasoning quality metrics — derived measures (e.g., validation ratio, average critique depth) that characterize the overall soundness of the trace.

This enables the "auditable and verifiable traces" promised by the DoT framework (README.md:L22), bridging the gap between the formal typed protocol (@node, @edge, @status) and a representation that humans and downstream tools can consume directly.

Usage

Trace report generation is invoked after reasoning path analysis, when you need to:

• Present the reasoning process to a human reviewer or stakeholder.
• Audit the trace for correctness, completeness, or policy compliance.
• Archive a permanent record of the reasoning DAG and its validation outcomes for reproducibility and future reference.

Theoretical Basis

Trace reporting is the human-facing output of the formal verification pipeline. It serves as the bridge between the internal DAG representation and external consumers of reasoning evidence.

The visualization faithfully represents the DAG structure:

• Nodes correspond to propositions emitted by the four roles (problem, proposer, critic, summarizer).
• Edges capture dependencies (use, critique, refine) and enforce acyclicity via the typed protocol's monotonic ID constraint.
• Validation status (validated / invalidated) is rendered per-node, reflecting the critic's judgments.

Statistics quantify reasoning quality:

Metric	Definition
Validation ratio	Proportion of proposer nodes marked validated versus total proposer nodes.
Branching factor	Average number of outgoing edges per proposer node, indicating exploration breadth.
Critical path length	Length of the longest dependency chain from the problem node to the summarizer node.
Invalidation rate	Fraction of proposer nodes marked invalidated, measuring self-correction activity.

Because the underlying DAG has formal guarantees from topos theory (the final summary is a colimit in the information order), the report can attest not only to what the model concluded but also to the structural soundness of the reasoning that led there (README.md:L116-130).

Related Pages

• Implementation:Diagram_of_thought_Diagram_of_thought_Graphviz_DAG_Visualization — Concrete Graphviz-based rendering of DoT reasoning DAGs.