Semantic Quorum Assurance: Collective Certification for Non-Deterministic AI Infrastructure
Jun He, Deying Yu
Why It Matters
What makes this one worth your time
As AI systems become more integrated into critical infrastructure, ensuring their operational safety is paramount, making SQA a relevant contribution to the field.
SQA offers a novel approach to ensure safety in non-deterministic AI infrastructure through collective certification.
Summary
The paper introduces Semantic Quorum Assurance (SQA), a control-plane primitive designed to enhance the safety of non-deterministic AI infrastructure by validating proposals through a diverse panel of sandboxed validators, significantly reducing unsafe approvals in cloud operations.
Key contributions
- Introduction of Semantic Quorum Assurance (SQA) as a control-plane primitive.
- Formalization of a correlated cognitive failure model for non-deterministic validators.
- Demonstrated significant reduction in unsafe proposal approvals through empirical evaluation.
Notable insights
- SQA's use of risk-adaptive quorum predicates allows for dynamic adjustment of validation weights based on assurance scores.
- The incorporation of a correlated cognitive failure model for non-deterministic validators provides a structured approach to understanding validation risks.
Possible limitations
- Not stated in the abstract.
Abstract
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. Classical distributed consensus protocols replicate deterministic state transitions but do not evaluate the safety of the proposed intent. To address this gap, we introduce Semantic Quorum Assurance (SQA), a control-plane primitive for governing non-deterministic agentic infrastructure. SQA represents proposals as declarative execution contracts bound to cryptographic evidence chains and routes them to a diverse panel of read-only, sandboxed validator agents. SQA aggregates their judgments under a risk-adaptive quorum predicate that enforces model and archetype diversity, adjusts weights based on calibrated assurance scores, and respects archetype-specific vetoes. Admitted proposals execute only through a sovereign execution gate. We instantiate SQA in a cloud-native control plane and formalize a correlated cognitive failure model for non-deterministic validators. On 500 infrastructure-inspired mutation scenarios, with safety results reported on held-out safe/unsafe trials excluding ambiguous scenarios, SQA reduces unsafe approval from 18.5% for single-agent validation to 0.3% while adding median validation latency of 1.45--4.12 seconds across the studied risk buckets.