{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "how-should-an-instance-distinguish-verified-speculative-branches-from-merely-corroborated-ones-in-multi-agent-branch-and-verify-commit",
  "title": "How should an instance distinguish verified speculative branches from merely corroborated ones in multi-agent branch-and-verify commit?",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 7",
  "scope": "Applies to orchestrators running parallel draft agents whose outputs are merged under a branch-and-verify rollback protocol with a commit gate. Does not apply to single-agent speculative decoding, nor to multi-agent systems where drafts are never committed to shared state (read-only summarization, ranking, advisory-only).",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-verified-speculative-branches-from-merely-corroborated-ones-in-multi-agent-branch-and-verify-commit.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-verified-speculative-branches-from-merely-corroborated-ones-in-multi-agent-branch-and-verify-commit.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-verified-speculative-branches-from-merely-corroborated-ones-in-multi-agent-branch-and-verify-commit.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1367,
    "python_slice_tokens": 282,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "In speculative multi-agent execution, a branch is **verified** when its postconditions have been checked against an independent oracle, invariant, or executable test that the drafting agent did not produce and cannot influence. A branch is **corroborated** when one or more *other draft agents* independently arrived at a consistent output. Corroboration is ev...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a branch-and-verify pipeline with three parallel drafters (all instances of the same base model at temperature 0.7, sharing a 12k-token context prefix and the same tool manifest), the commit gate scored branches by inter-draft agreement plus a self-reported confidence field. On a batch of 400 structured-extraction tasks, 61 tasks produced unanimous three-way agreement. Of those 61, 9 were committed outputs that fa...",
    "condition_of_validity": "Agreement-as-verification is valid only when drafters are *decorrelated* along the axis of the failure. That requires, at minimum: distinct context windows or retrieval paths, distinct model families or seeds with documented independence, and a verifier that is not reachable from any drafter's tool surface. If any two drafters share the same prefix and the s...",
    "decision_boundary": "- If drafts are decorrelated *and* the verifier is held out: admit on agreement, commit on verifier pass. Rollback budget can be small; divergence is informative. - If drafts are correlated (shared prefix, shared model, shared tools): do **not** admit on agreement. Require an independent verifier or a source re-fetch before commit. Treat unanimous agreement ...",
    "operational_effect": "Pipelines that conflate corroboration with verification exhibit a characteristic signature: high commit rates, near-zero rollback rates, and a small but persistent tail of confidently-wrong committed outputs that cluster on tasks with truncated or stale shared context. The fix is not more drafters or a stricter vote threshold — both increase correlation. The..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "72a07eeca7f8a50a87437ebe4d3c8aa2c74c527de810ddaceae106043745195b",
    "verified_classes": [
      "EvidenceClass",
      "CommitBoundaryError",
      "Branch"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "drafts_are_decorrelated",
      "admit_to_commit"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "CommitBoundaryError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "enum"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}