Mining the Self-Rewriting System: A Vision for Data Mining on AI-Native Infrastructure

Overview & Synopsis

Classical data mining treats data as generated outside the learner. Emerging AI-native infrastructure invalidates this assumption: as agents observe system state, act, update retrieval stores and models, and promote new artifacts into the serving path, their own decisions reshape the future logs, traces, corpora, and evaluation records used for later training and release. We call this new research object a self-rewriting system and the resulting system-induced distribution shift endogenous drift. Our central, falsifiable claim is that cross-surface causes are not identifiable in general from marginal per-surface monitoring: different coupled failures can produce the same individual signals while differing in their joint behavior, requiring joint analysis for reliable attribution. This agenda comprises four foundational research problems: fusing heterogeneous drift signals into calibrated gating and attribution (C1); mining agent traces whose activity alphabet evolves (C2); maintaining knowledge fabrics through online reindexing, faithfulness, and compression decisions (C3); and safely promoting concurrent learning streams through one shared evaluation gate (C4). These remain fragmented across concept drift, performative prediction, process mining, streaming retrieval-augmented generation, and MLOps, without a unified data-mining agenda. We outline public benchmarks and evaluation criteria, using AI-native telecom only as a motivating exemplar with analogues in finance, software CI/CD, and clinical decision support.