Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Atomix: Timely, Transactional Tool Use for Reliable Agentic Workflows

Bardia Mohammadi, Nearchos Potamitis, Lars Klein, Akhil Arora, Laurent Bindschaedler

TL;DR

Atomix, a runtime that provides progress-aware transactional semantics for agent tool calls, is introduced, a runtime that provides progress-aware transactional semantics for agent tool calls under speculation and contention.

Abstract

LLM agents increasingly act on external systems, yet tool effects are immediate. Under failures, speculation, or contention, losing branches can leak unintended side effects with no safe rollback. We introduce Atomix, a runtime that provides progress-aware transactional semantics for agent tool calls. Atomix tags each call with an epoch, tracks per-resource frontiers, and commits only when progress predicates indicate safety; bufferable effects can be delayed, while externalized effects are tracked and compensated on abort. Across real workloads with fault injection, transactional retry improves task success, while frontier-gated commit strengthens isolation under speculation and contention.

Atomix: Timely, Transactional Tool Use for Reliable Agentic Workflows

TL;DR

Atomix, a runtime that provides progress-aware transactional semantics for agent tool calls, is introduced, a runtime that provides progress-aware transactional semantics for agent tool calls under speculation and contention.

Abstract

LLM agents increasingly act on external systems, yet tool effects are immediate. Under failures, speculation, or contention, losing branches can leak unintended side effects with no safe rollback. We introduce Atomix, a runtime that provides progress-aware transactional semantics for agent tool calls. Atomix tags each call with an epoch, tracks per-resource frontiers, and commits only when progress predicates indicate safety; bufferable effects can be delayed, while externalized effects are tracked and compensated on abort. Across real workloads with fault injection, transactional retry improves task success, while frontier-gated commit strengthens isolation under speculation and contention.
Paper Structure (90 sections, 2 figures, 13 tables, 1 algorithm)

This paper contains 90 sections, 2 figures, 13 tables, 1 algorithm.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Contributions.
  3. Paper organization.
  4. Background and Motivation
  5. State of the art.
  6. Why this matters.
  7. Running example.
  8. Design requirements.
  9. Transactional Abstractions and Semantics
  10. Core Abstractions
  11. Commit and Abort Rules
  12. Safety Invariants
  13. Atomicity (by effect class).
  14. Exactly-once effects (model).
  15. Progress-safe commit.
  16. ...and 75 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Speculative parallel execution with frontier gating. Three agents pursue different strategies; bufferable effects execute in isolation without contamination, and after abort, only the winning branch's effects persist.
  • Figure 2: Tool call lifecycle through Atomix. The runtime interposes between the workflow runtime and external resources. Each call is assigned an epoch, wrapped as an effect by an adapter, and tracked in a transaction. Commit is gated by per-resource frontiers; aborted transactions trigger compensation.