Preregistered Belief Revision Contracts

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 16 Apr 2026] Preregistered Belief Revision Contracts Saad Alqithami Deliberative multi-agent systems allow agents to exchange messages and revise beliefs over time. While this interaction is meant to improve performance, it can also create dangerous conformity effects: agreement, confidence, prestige, or majority size may be treated as if they were evidence, producing high-confidence convergence to false conclusions. To address this, we introduce PBRC (Preregistered Belief Revision Contracts), a protocol-level mechanism that strictly separates open communication from admissible epistemic change. A PBRC contract publicly fixes first-order evidence triggers, admissible revision operators, a priority rule, and a fallback policy. A non-fallback step is accepted only when it cites a preregistered trigger and provides a nonempty witness set of externally validated evidence tokens. This ensures that every substantive belief change is both enforceable by a router and auditable after the fact. In this paper, (a) we prove that under evidential contracts with conservative fallback, social-only rounds cannot increase confidence and cannot generate purely conformity-driven wrong-but-sure cascades. (b) We show that auditable trigger protocols admit evidential PBRC normal forms that preserve belief trajectories and canonicalized audit traces. (c) We demonstrate that sound enforcement yields epistemic accountability: any change of top hypothesis is attributable to a concrete validated witness set. For token-invariant contracts, (d) we prove that enforced trajectories depend only on token-exposure traces; under flooding dissemination, these traces are characterized exactly by truncated reachability, giving tight diameter bounds for universal evidence closure. Finally, we introduce a companion contractual dynamic doxastic logic to specify trace invariants, and provide simulations illustrating cascade suppression, auditability, and robustness-liveness trade-offs. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15558 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.15558v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15558 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Saad Alqithami [view email] [v1] Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:22:54 UTC (256 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL cs.LO cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)