The Honest Quorum Problem: Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agentic Infrastructure
4.00T1 sourcearXiv cs.MA
Source record
Published by arXiv cs.MA (T1 source). The original is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16109.
Pipeline notes
The summary and note below are generated by the signal pipeline — they are Beyond Desk’s reading, not quotations from the source.
SummaryThe paper introduces Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (EBFT), a fault-tolerance model for agentic infrastructure. It defines the Honest Quorum Problem: protocol-compliant agents can still endorse semantically invalid transitions due to correlated reasoning errors from shared model weights, training data, or prompts. EBFT augments the Byzantine fault bound with confidence-indexed quantities for semantic safety and liveness, and derives quorum-threshold conditions for validity and agreement.
Why it mattersFormalizes a specific failure mode in multi-agent consensus — correlated reasoning errors when validators share model provenance. Useful input for anyone designing quorum-based agentic infrastructure, beyond protocol compliance.