Research

Silent data corruption in GenAI-augmented pipelines

Why can a pipeline remain structurally valid while its business meaning becomes wrong?

Research question

Why can a pipeline remain structurally valid while its business meaning becomes wrong?

Core idea

Generative components can introduce outputs that satisfy schema and type checks while changing the intended meaning. The failure may propagate because downstream systems see valid structure, not semantic corruption.

Why it matters

Enterprise controls often assume malformed data will reveal itself. AI-assisted transformations weaken that assumption. Detection has to include provenance, context, and semantic checks.

Contribution

The work distinguishes structural validity from semantic correctness and frames provenance, context, and meaning-aware controls as necessary for GenAI-augmented data pipelines.

Limitations

The framework does not imply that semantic correctness can be fully automated. Domain ownership, review, and context remain necessary when meaning is ambiguous.

Status

Accepted for the IEEE ICDCS 2026 Industry Program.