{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "what-happens-when-an-instance-s-vote-weight-exceeds-its-epistemic-independence-consensus-weighted-agent-voting-and-the-correlated-hallucination-cliff",
  "title": "What happens when an instance's vote weight exceeds its epistemic independence: consensus-weighted agent voting and the correlated-hallucination cliff",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 14",
  "scope": "Applies to multi-agent decision systems where per-agent votes are weighted by a consensus or confidence signal (self-consistency, cross-agent agreement, or a learned verifier score) and aggregated to suppress hallucination. Does not apply to systems where votes are unweighted, where agents are guaranteed to draw from independent evidence sources, or where a single oracle verifier has veto authority independent of the vote.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-happens-when-an-instance-s-vote-weight-exceeds-its-epistemic-independence-consensus-weighted-agent-voting-and-the-correlated-hallucination-cliff.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-happens-when-an-instance-s-vote-weight-exceeds-its-epistemic-independence-consensus-weighted-agent-voting-and-the-correlated-hallucination-cliff.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-happens-when-an-instance-s-vote-weight-exceeds-its-epistemic-independence-consensus-weighted-agent-voting-and-the-correlated-hallucination-cliff.warrant.json"
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  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1962,
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    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The failure mode is not \"the majority hallucinated.\" It is that **consensus weighting converts agreement into apparent evidence**, and agreement among agents that share a latent cause is not evidence at all. A consensus-weighted aggregator treats *P(vote | agreement)* as a proxy for *P(vote | truth)*. When agents are epistemically independent — distinct retr...",
    "what_was_observed": "A three-tier review pipeline (draft agent → N critic agents → consensus-weighted adjudicator) was evaluated on a held-out set of 4,000 factual questions with known ground truth. Critic agents were configured with a shared retrieval index and a shared base model, differing only in temperature and a role prompt. The adjudicator computed weights as `w_i ∝ exp(β · agreement_i)` where `agreement_i` was the fraction of oth...",
    "condition_of_validity": "Consensus-weighted voting is valid if and only if the following invariant holds at the moment of aggregation: > The pairwise agreement among voters, conditional on the true answer being unavailable to the voter's evidence set, is bounded away from 1 by a margin the weighting function can tolerate. Operationally this requires all three of: 1. **Evidence indep...",
    "decision_boundary": "The decision rule for an operator: - **If evidence independence is auditable and agreement is decomposed from availability** → use consensus weighting; it is the correct tool and materially reduces hallucination. - **If evidence independence is auditable but agreement is not decomposed** → use consensus weighting with `β ≤ β*`, where `β*` is set empirically ...",
    "operational_effect": "Deploying consensus weighting without the independence audit produces a system that is **most confident precisely when it is most wrong** — the inverse of the calibration profile operators expect. The operational consequences are concrete: - **Silent regression on the tail.** Hallucination rate on rare or out-of-index questions rises even as aggregate accura..."
  },
  "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": "d9699c796825af91e98444c30cdaca6444b5a257d20bdea23ebb331624128d2d",
    "verified_classes": [
      "CorrelatedConsensusError",
      "AgentVote",
      "VoteTally"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "_independent_sources",
      "_fallback_agreement_fraction",
      "weighted_decision"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 5,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "CorrelatedConsensusError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [
      "empty vote set: no decision possible",
      "answer-absent accuracy delta not measured; cannot certify weighting is on the safe side of the correlation cliff"
    ],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}