The Honest Quorum Problem: Epistemic Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agentic Infrastructure
State machine replication (SMR) and Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus guarantee agreement despite a bounded number of arbitrary, colluding faulty participants. However, these guarantees rely on participants outside this set correctly executing the protocol's transition semantics. Agentic validators expose a weaker boundary: an authenticated, responsive, non-equivocating, and protocol-compliant reasoning participant may still endorse a semantically invalid transition due to reasoning errors. We call this failure mode an epistemic fault, and the collective phenomenon the Honest Quorum Problem (where "honest" means protocol-compliant, not semantically correct). Such a quorum can satis...
| Authors | Jun He, Deying Yu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 July 2026 |
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