
AI pipelines built around LLMs are often treated as deterministic systems, but in practice they behave as probabilistic distributed systems. This paper presents a distributed-systems-inspired framework for managing non-determinism in production AI inference pipelines. We introduce Probabilistic Compute Graphs (PCGs), identify key sources of variability, and propose five architectural principles—versioning, tracing, replay, quorum validation, and guardrails—instantiated in a two-plane architecture separating inference from reliability infrastructure. The framework provides a practical approach to improving reproducibility, observability, and consistency in systems such as RAG and multi-agent pipelines. This is a position and systems-design paper focused on runtime reliability of inference pipelines rather than training-time reproducibility. Version 2: Formatting improvements and layout refinements. No changes to technical content.
distributed systems, AI Systems, Agent 2 Agent (A2A), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Multi-agent AI systems, large language models, AI infrastructure, non-determinism, Model Context Protocol (MCP)
distributed systems, AI Systems, Agent 2 Agent (A2A), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Multi-agent AI systems, large language models, AI infrastructure, non-determinism, Model Context Protocol (MCP)
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 0 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
