Monotonicity-Guided Bottom-Up Petri Net Discovery: The SPECpp Framework

Process discovery is one of the central challenges in process mining. Petri nets are particularly attractive because simple local constructs can express complex behavior, including concurrency. While their global behavior may be difficult to analyze, individual places can be efficiently characterized using monotonic properties, enabling bottom-up discovery. Unlike top-down approaches such as the Inductive Miner, which rely on predefined constructs for sequences, choices, loops, and concurrency, our approach allows such structures to emerge organically and can exploit the full expressive power of Petri nets, including free-choice constructs and long-term dependencies. The main challenge is the exponential number of candidate places and their combinations. We present the SPECpp framework which implements strategies to obtain high-quality models under time and resource constraints. SPECpp supports rapid experimentation and is used to evaluate these strategies using both synthetic and real-life event data.

Framework for Grouping Local Process Models

Local Process Models (LPMs) are an underexplored concept in process mining. LPMs describe patterns in event data considering sequence, choice, concurrency, and loop. In recent years, process mining has proved successful in the analysis and improvement of operational processes. More often than not, surprising findings are found when one does not consider the full process, making LPMs and their discovery highly valuable. However, similar to other pattern mining approaches, LPM discovery algorithms face the problems of model explosion and model repetition, i.e., the algorithms may create hundreds if not thousands of LPMs, and subsets of them are close in structure or behavior. Practically, no analyst would be able to comb through thousands of LPMs leading to using a sample of LPMs that are easily accessible. The current sentiment is that the top-scoring LPMs form the optimal sample to be presented. However, different applications should demand a different optimal sample. With this work, we show that if the goal of the mined LPMs is to understand a process, using the top-scoring LPMs as an optimal sample is a poor choice because of high repetition. We propose a framework for grouping LPMs and creating an optimal sample by taking one representative LPM for each group. We measure similarity between models via established process model similarity measures or by comparing the context in which an LPM appears. The context is formed using data attributes available in the underlying event logs. We demonstrate the usefulness of grouping on multiple event logs by comparing repetition and coverage between samples comprised of the top-scoring models and the representatives of discovered groups.

All Eyes on the Workflow: Automated and Efficient Event Discovery from Video Streams

Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.

Compliance-Aware Predictive Process Monitoring: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach

Existing approaches for predictive process monitoring are sub-symbolic, meaning that they learn correlations between descriptive features and a target feature fully based on data, e.g., predicting the surgical needs of a patient based on historical events and biometrics. However, such approaches fail to incorporate domain-specific process constraints (knowledge), e.g., surgery can only be planned if the patient was released more than a week ago, limiting the adherence to compliance and providing less accurate predictions. In this paper, we present a neuro-symbolic approach for predictive process monitoring, leveraging Logic Tensor Networks (LTNs) to inject process knowledge into predictive models. The proposed approach follows a structured pipeline consisting of four key stages: 1) feature extraction; 2) rule extraction; 3) knowledge base creation; and 4) knowledge injection. Our evaluation shows that, in addition to learning the process constraints, the neuro-symbolic model also achieves better performance, demonstrating higher compliance and improved accuracy compared to baseline approaches across all compliance-aware experiments.

Neuro-Symbolic Process Anomaly Detection

Process anomaly detection is an important application of process mining for identifying deviations from the normal behavior of a process. Neural network-based methods have recently been applied to this task, learning directly from event logs without requiring a predefined process model. However, since anomaly detection is a purely statistical task, these models fail to incorporate human domain knowledge. As a result, rare but conformant traces are often misclassified as anomalies due to their low frequency, which limits the effectiveness of the detection process. Recent developments in the field of neuro-symbolic AI have introduced Logic Tensor Networks (LTN) as a means to integrate symbolic knowledge into neural networks using real-valued logic. In this work, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that integrates domain knowledge into neural anomaly detection using LTN and Declare constraints. Using autoencoder models as a foundation, we encode Declare constraints as soft logical guiderails within the learning process to distinguish between anomalous and rare but conformant behavior. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach improves F1 scores even when as few as 10 conformant traces exist, and that the choice of Declare constraint and by extension human domain knowledge significantly influences performance gains.

PMAx: An Agentic Framework for AI-Driven Process Mining

Process mining provides powerful insights into organizational workflows, but extracting these insights typically requires expertise in specialized query languages and data science tools. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential to democratize process mining by enabling business users to interact with process data through natural language. However, using LLMs as direct analytical engines over raw event logs introduces fundamental challenges: LLMs struggle with deterministic reasoning and may hallucinate metrics, while sending large, sensitive logs to external AI services raises serious data-privacy concerns. To address these limitations, we present PMAx, an autonomous agentic framework that functions as a virtual process analyst. Rather than relying on LLMs to generate process models or compute analytical results, PMAx employs a privacy-preserving multi-agent architecture. An Engineer agent analyzes event-log metadata and autonomously generates local scripts to run established process mining algorithms, compute exact metrics, and produce artifacts such as process models, summary tables, and visualizations. An Analyst agent then interprets these insights and artifacts to compile comprehensive reports. By separating computation from interpretation and executing analysis locally, PMAx ensures mathematical accuracy and data privacy while enabling non-technical users to transform high-level business questions into reliable process insights.

Knowledge-Driven Hallucination in Large Language Models: An Empirical Study on Process Modeling

The utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in analytical tasks is rooted in their vast pre-trained knowledge, which allows them to interpret ambiguous inputs and infer missing information. However, this same capability introduces a critical risk of what we term knowledge-driven hallucination: a phenomenon where the model's output contradicts explicit source evidence because it is overridden by the model's generalized internal knowledge. This paper investigates this phenomenon by evaluating LLMs on the task of automated process modeling, where the goal is to generate a formal business process model from a given source artifact. The domain of Business Process Management (BPM) provides an ideal context for this study, as many core business processes follow standardized patterns, making it likely that LLMs possess strong pre-trained schemas for them. We conduct a controlled experiment designed to create scenarios with deliberate conflict between provided evidence and the LLM's background knowledge. We use inputs describing both standard and deliberately atypical process structures to measure the LLM's fidelity to the provided evidence. Our work provides a methodology for assessing this critical reliability issue and raises awareness of the need for rigorous validation of AI-generated artifacts in any evidence-based domain.

No AI Without PI! Object-Centric Process Mining as the Enabler for Generative, Predictive, and Prescriptive Artificial Intelligence

The uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts the way we work, interact, do business, and conduct research. However, organizations struggle to apply AI successfully in industrial settings where the focus is on end-to-end operational processes. Here, we consider generative, predictive, and prescriptive AI and elaborate on the challenges of diagnosing and improving such processes. We show that AI needs to be grounded using Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM). Process-related data are structured and organization-specific and, unlike text, processes are often highly dynamic. OCPM is the missing link connecting data and processes and enables different forms of AI. We use the term Process Intelligence (PI) to refer to the amalgamation of process-centric data-driven techniques able to deal with a variety of object and event types, enabling AI in an organizational context. This paper explains why AI requires PI to improve operational processes and highlights opportunities for successfully combining OCPM and generative, predictive, and prescriptive AI.

Unlocking Non-Block-Structured Decisions: Inductive Mining with Choice Graphs

Process discovery aims to automatically derive process models from event logs, enabling organizations to analyze and improve their operational processes. Inductive mining algorithms, while prioritizing soundness and efficiency through hierarchical modeling languages, often impose a strict block-structured representation. This limits their ability to accurately capture the complexities of real-world processes. While recent advancements like the Partially Ordered Workflow Language (POWL) have addressed the block-structure limitation for concurrency, a significant gap remains in effectively modeling non-block-structured decision points. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing an extension of POWL to handle non-block-structured decisions through the introduction of choice graphs. Choice graphs offer a structured yet flexible approach to model complex decision logic within the hierarchical framework of POWL. We present an inductive mining discovery algorithm that uses our extension and preserves the quality guarantees of the inductive mining framework. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the discovered models, enriched with choice graphs, more precisely represent the complex decision-making behavior found in real-world processes, without compromising the high scalability inherent in inductive mining techniques.

Releasing Differentially Private Event Logs Using Generative Models

In recent years, the industry has been witnessing an extended usage of process mining and automated event data analysis. Consequently, there is a rising significance in addressing privacy apprehensions related to the inclusion of sensitive and private information within event data utilized by process mining algorithms. State-of-the-art research mainly focuses on providing quantifiable privacy guarantees, e.g., via differential privacy, for trace variants that are used by the main process mining techniques, e.g., process discovery. However, privacy preservation techniques designed for the release of trace variants are still insufficient to meet all the demands of industry-scale utilization. Moreover, ensuring privacy guarantees in situations characterized by a high occurrence of infrequent trace variants remains a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we introduce two novel approaches for releasing differentially private trace variants based on trained generative models. With TraVaG, we leverage \textit{Generative Adversarial Networks} (GANs) to sample from a privatized implicit variant distribution. Our second method employs \textit{Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models} that reconstruct artificial trace variants from noise via trained Markov chains. Both methods offer industry-scale benefits and elevate the degree of privacy assurances, particularly in scenarios featuring a substantial prevalence of infrequent variants. Also, they overcome the shortcomings of conventional privacy preservation techniques, such as bounding the length of variants and introducing fake variants. Experimental results on real-life event data demonstrate that our approaches surpass state-of-the-art techniques in terms of privacy guarantees and utility preservation.