The Honest Quorum Problem: Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agentic Infrastructure
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TL;DR - This paper introduces Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (EBFT) for systems where protocol-compliant AI agents can collectively approve semantically invalid actions. It matters because conventional BFT agreement does not ensure correctness when validators share correlated reasoning failures.
- Defines the “Honest Quorum Problem”: compliant, non-equivocating agents can certify an invalid state transition.
- Separates coherent invalid endorsements (
e_δ) from unusable validator support (u_ε) to model safety and liveness independently. - Derives quorum conditions for semantic validity, agreement, liveness, and feasible threshold selection.
- Argues that adding agents helps only when it reduces the upper-tail concentration of correlated invalid or unusable responses.
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The Honest Quorum Problem: Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agentic Infrastructure
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TL;DR - This paper introduces Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (EBFT) for systems where protocol-compliant AI agents can collectively approve semantically invalid actions. It matters because conventional BFT agreement does not ensure correctness when validators share correlated reasoning failures.
- Defines the “Honest Quorum Problem”: compliant, non-equivocating agents can certify an invalid state transition.
- Separates coherent invalid endorsements (
e_δ) from unusable validator support (u_ε) to model safety and liveness independently. - Derives quorum conditions for semantic validity, agreement, liveness, and feasible threshold selection.
- Argues that adding agents helps only when it reduces the upper-tail concentration of correlated invalid or unusable responses.