Towards an Autonomous AI Steward for Large-Scale Physics Experiments: Integrating Causal Diagnostics, RAG, and Conformal Prediction

Oliver Noll, Nicholas Tan Jerome, Alexander Lehnen, Frank Simon, Frank Maas

Long-term particle physics experiments face critical operational challenges: monitoring non-stationary machine data streams and preserving tacit expert knowledge. We present the "Helmholtz Co-Pilot," a hybrid Multi-Agent System (MAS) acting as an autonomous experiment steward. The system can be triggered interactively by human operators or autonomously by an asynchronous causal diagnostics engine that runs independently of the MAS reasoning core. Continuously monitoring live hardware streams such as data acquisition and slow control, this engine performs dynamic causal discovery to trace cascading alarms back to their root causes and applies adaptive model selection to keep forecasts reliable across shifting machine states; upon detecting an anomaly, it hands a structured diagnostic report to the MAS. The reasoning layer itself relies on a high-throughput C++ core and a Python edge architecture orchestrating a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of specialized ReAct workers. It integrates a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) backbone for institutional memory and leverages conformal prediction to bound its evidence-based recommendations with mathematical coverage guarantees. This…