arXiv Machine Learning

The Honest Quorum Problem: Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agentic Infrastructure

arXiv:2607. 16109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State machine replication (SMR) and Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus guarantee agreement despite a bounded number of arbitrary, colluding faulty participants.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Semantic Quorum Assurance: Collective Certification for Non-Deterministic AI Infrastructure

arXiv:2606. 08021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents are integrated into autonomous cloud operations, distributed systems face a semantic reliability problem: proposer agents can generate production mutations, such as modifying IAM policies, opening firewall security groups, or executing data exports, that are syntactically valid and statically authorized but operationally unsafe.

By Jun He, Deying Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Hierarchical Certified Semantic Commitment for Byzantine-Resilient LLM-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606. 07316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Byzantine collaboration among large-language-model agents requires a finality-control primitive: given delivered stochastic, structured natural-language proposals, the protocol must decide whether the round supports a commit, what kind of commit, or a typed safe abort.

By Haoran Xu, Lei Zhang, Iadh Ounis, Xianbin Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Agent Mesh: Reliability Primitives for Non-Idempotent Agent Delegation - Identity Adequacy and Evidence Adequacy

The paper reports a failure study of a production agentic software‑delivery platform, analyzing 147 incidents across 81 runs. It shows that the standard reliability primitives—retry, timeout, and error‑rate circuit breaking—fail in practice, leading to costly loops, false trips, and blocked work. The authors identify two cross‑cutting causes—identity adequacy and evidence adequacy—and propose seven new reliability primitives that enforce reliability at the delegation level.

By Mazhar Shaikh, Anurag Rajkumar Bombarde, Harshal Pathak
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Byzantine Accountability Without Consensus: Strong Eventual Consistency for Non-Associative, Stochastic, Robust Aggregation

arXiv:2607. 10305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Byzantine-robust aggregation rules such as multi-Krum assume a central coordinator, and decentralising them is obstructed by the rules themselves: they are globally coupled, non-associative, and discontinuous, so an ulpscale perturbation can flip the selected subset, moving the output by a non-vanishing amount.

By Ryan Gillespie
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao