Workflow Cards: Structured Summaries of Workflow Executions Using Provenance Data

Model Cards and Data Cards have demonstrated the value of structured, human-readable documentation for machine learning artifacts, capturing their context, parameters, limitations, and intended use. However, these practices remain focused on static artifacts (the datasets and trained models themselves) while overlooking the workflow executions that produce, transform, and evaluate them. Such executions hold critical details about data preparation, parameter choice, runtime behavior, resource use, and intermediate transformations, precisely where bias, performance variation, and reproducibility gaps tend to originate. To close this gap, we introduce Workflow Cards: structured summaries that condense the machine-readable provenance data of a workflow execution into a form both humans and large language models (LLMs) can read and analyze. This paper has two main parts. First, it defines a Workflow Card template informed by a representative set of provenance questions that surface from the execution-level data missing from Model and Data Cards. Second, it evaluates how effectively LLMs use Workflow Cards to understand workflow executions compared with querying provenance databases through a schema-based interface. Results show that Workflow Cards provide execution-level information absent from existing card types, such as Model Cards and Data Cards, thereby filling an important documentation gap; and that Workflow Cards nearly double answer quality compared with schema-based querying, consistently across LLM-as-a-Judge and human assessments.

yProv4DV: Reproducible Data Visualization Scripts Out of the Box

While results visualization is a critical phase to the communication of new academic results, plots are frequently shared without the complete combination of code, input data, execution context and outputs required to independently reproduce the resulting figures. Existing reproducibility solutions tend to focus on computational pipelines or workflow management systems, not covering script-based visualization practices commonly used by researchers and practitioners. Additionally, the minimalist nature of current Python data visualization libraries tend to speed up the creation of images, disincentivizing users from spending time integrating additional tools into these short scripts. This paper proposes yProv4DV, a library lightweight designed to enable reproducible data visualization scripts through the use of provenance information, minimizing the necessity for code modifications. Through a single call, users can track inputs, outputs and source code files, enabling saving and full reproducibility of their data visualization software. As a result, this library fills a gap in reproducible research workflows by addressing the reproducibility of plots in scientific publications.

yProv4ML: Effortless Provenance Tracking for Machine Learning Systems

The rapid growth of interest in large language models (LLMs) reflects their potential for flexibility and generalization, and attracted the attention of a diverse range of researchers. However, the advent of these techniques has also brought to light the lack of transparency and rigor with which development is pursued. In particular, the inability to determine the number of epochs and other hyperparameters in advance presents challenges in identifying the best model. To address this challenge, machine learning frameworks such as MLFlow can automate the collection of this type of information. However, these tools capture data using proprietary formats and pose little attention to lineage. This paper proposes yProv4ML, a framework to capture provenance information generated during machine learning processes in PROV-JSON format, with minimal code modifications.