RaivenTracks: Branching Provenance for Conversational Visualization Workflows

Abstract

As AI agents increasingly participate in scientific workflows, scientists are shifting from direct authorship toward oversight, inspection, and steering. LLM-driven visualization systems are a promising interface for this hand-off, yet they remain largely stateless, forcing users to reconstruct context across refinements and offering little support for revisiting prior decisions or exploring alternatives. We present RaivenTracks, a workflow-aware extension of the Raiven DSL-mediated visualization pipeline that treats validated visualization specifications as persistent, branchable checkpoints. Because each checkpoint is a verifiable RaivenDSL specification rather than a dialogue transcript, restoring a node recompiles a known artifact rather than re-interpreting prior context. RaivenTracks contributes a two-level state management architecture that pairs a persistent, branchable version tree with a fine-grained undo/redo stack over runtime visualization settings, across both InfoVis and SciVis backends. A formative pilot study with three visualization researchers shows early promise, with all participants adopting the version tree for branching and recovery, and surfaces design directions for tree navigation, node labeling, and scalability that inform a planned controlled comparison against Raiven without version history. We frame branchable conversational visualization history as a step toward provenance support for future scientist-in-the-loop oversight of AI-driven scientific workflows.