{"ID":2859180,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05621","arxiv_id":"2510.05621","title":"Decoupling Correctness from Policy: A Deterministic Causal Structure for Multi-Agent Systems","abstract":"In distributed multi-agent systems, correctness is often entangled with operational policies such as scheduling, batching, or routing, which makes systems brittle since performance-driven policy evolution may break integrity guarantees. This paper introduces the Deterministic Causal Structure (DCS), a formal foundation that decouples correctness from policy. We develop a minimal axiomatic theory and prove four results: existence and uniqueness, policy-agnostic invariance, observational equivalence, and axiom minimality. These results show that DCS resolves causal ambiguities that value-centric convergence models such as CRDTs cannot address, and that removing any axiom collapses determinism into ambiguity. DCS thus emerges as a boundary principle of asynchronous computation, analogous to CAP and FLP: correctness is preserved only within the expressive power of a join-semilattice. All guarantees are established by axioms and proofs, with only minimal illustrative constructions included to aid intuition. This work establishes correctness as a fixed, policy-agnostic substrate, a Correctness-as-a-Chassis paradigm, on which distributed intelligent systems can be built modularly, safely, and evolvably.","short_abstract":"In distributed multi-agent systems, correctness is often entangled with operational policies such as scheduling, batching, or routing, which makes systems brittle since performance-driven policy evolution may break integrity guarantees. This paper introduces the Deterministic Causal Structure (DCS), a formal foundation...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05621","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05621v1","authors":"[\"Zhiyuan Ren\",\"Tao Zhang\",\"Wenchi Chen\"]","published":"2025-10-07T07:10:49Z","proceeding":"cs.DC","tasks":"[\"cs.DC\",\"cs.MA\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}