Web Agent Reasoning Federation (WARF)
draft-westerbeck-warf-protocol-00

Network Working Group                                    J. Westerbeck
Internet-Draft                                           Astrognosy AI
Intended status: Informational                           April 6, 2026
Expires: October 8, 2026

                Web Agent Reasoning Federation (WARF)
                   draft-westerbeck-warf-protocol-00

Abstract

   WARF (Web Agent Reasoning Federation) defines a
   deterministic, identity-free protocol for arbitrating competing
   agent outputs. Three flows -- Xfer, Xact, and Xchange -- provide
   structural signature transfer, identity-free profile matching, and
   open semantic arbitration respectively.

   After Xchange arbitration determines a winner, the Xtend pipeline
   (VASE corpus expansion + Balmathic kappa acceleration detection)
   automatically quality-gates the result. If the caller supplied a
   valid reason:// address and kappa exceeds the promotion threshold,
   the winning artifact is promoted into the reason:// reasoning
   artifact registry at the exact URI provided by the caller.

   The protocol produces auditable, SHA-256 chained verdicts without
   exposing raw data, model weights, or agent identity.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3.  The Three Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.1.  Xfer (Structural Signature Transfer) . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.2.  Xact (Identity-Free Profile Matching)  . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.3.  Xchange (Open Semantic Arbitration)  . . . . . . . . . .  7
   4.  Cargo Package Schema  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   5.  Xtend: Automatic Quality Gate and reason:// Bridge  . . . . 10
   6.  The reason:// Namespace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   8.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
   9.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

1.  Introduction

   The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents has created a
   coordination problem: multiple agents producing competing outputs
   for the same task have no neutral, deterministic mechanism for
   resolving disagreements. Existing approaches (LLM-as-judge, voting,
   prediction markets) are probabilistic, authority-dependent, and
   non-auditable.

   WARF addresses this by defining a layered, deterministic arbitration
   protocol. The core invariant is that identical inputs MUST always
   produce identical winners and identical audit hashes. No agent
   identity, rank, or declared confidence influences scoring.

   WARF operates in three distinct flows that share only the outer
   protocol envelope (cargo package schema, audit hash chain, and
   reason:// addressing):

   o  Xfer -- Structural Signature Transfer: allows an agent trained
      on sensitive data to share the structural pattern it learned
      without sharing the data itself.

   o  Xact -- Identity-Free Profile Matching: allows parties to
      determine population similarity without disclosing identities
      or raw records.

   o  Xchange -- Open Semantic Arbitration: neutral arbitration of
      competing text-based answers and evidence corpora.

   After Xchange determines a winner, the Xtend pipeline (VASE corpus
   expansion + Balmathic kappa acceleration detection) automatically
   quality-gates the result. If the caller supplied a valid reason://
   address and kappa exceeds the promotion threshold, the winning
   artifact is promoted into the reason:// reasoning artifact registry
   at the exact URI provided by the caller.

   WARF sits above orchestration and transport layers. It is designed
   for real-world constraints: CPU-only operation, identity-free
   arbitration, full auditability, and privacy-by-architecture
   (non-invertible structural signatures with Pearson correlation
   <= 0.0149).

2.  Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY",
   and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described
   in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in
   all capitals, as shown here.

   Xport
      A server implementing the WARF protocol. The Astrognosy AI
      reference implementation is the genesis Xport node.

   Xfer, Xact, Xchange
      The three core flows (see Section 3).

   Xtend
      The automatic quality gate that runs after Xchange arbitration.
      It computes convergence, applies Balmathic kappa, and decides
      whether to promote the winner to the reason:// registry when
      a valid reason_address is supplied by the caller.

   Cargo Package
      The outer envelope submitted to any WARF flow.

   reason://
      The URI scheme for discoverable, versioned reasoning artifacts.

3.  The Three Flows

3.1.  Xfer (Structural Signature Transfer)

   Xfer allows an agent trained on private data to share a non-
   invertible structural signature without transmitting raw data.

   Endpoint: POST /v1/warf/xfer

   Request schema (JSON):

      {
        "exchange_id": "<uuid>",
        "query_id": "<string>",
        "timestamp": "<ISO-8601>",
        "domain": "<industrial|medicine|finance|open>",
        "flow_type": "xfer",
        "payload": {
          "psv_centroid": [<f1>, <f2>, ..., <f10>],
          "theta_a": <float>,
          "theta_b": <float>,
          "theta_c": <float>,
          "fault_class": "<string>",
          "agent_id": "<sha256-hex>",
          "max_offset": <integer>
        }
      }

   Response schema (JSON):

      {
        "transfer_id": "<uuid>",
        "status": "accepted",
        "audit_hash": "<sha256-hex>"
      }

   Conformance requirements:

   o  Implementations MUST NOT accept or store raw data. Only PSV
      centroids and thresholds are permitted.

   o  Implementations MUST verify that psv_centroid has exactly 10
      elements.

   o  The audit_hash MUST be computed from the canonical JSON
      serialization of the request payload.

3.2.  Xact (Identity-Free Profile Matching)

   Xact produces a similarity score between two or more population
   profiles without disclosing identities or raw records.

   Bilateral endpoint: POST /v1/warf/xact
   N-way endpoint: POST /v1/warf/xact/select

   Bilateral request schema (JSON):

      {
        "exchange_id": "<uuid>",
        "query_id": "<string>",
        "timestamp": "<ISO-8601>",
        "domain": "<domain>",
        "flow_type": "xact",
        "payload": {
          "profile_a": [<f1>, ..., <f10>],
          "profile_b": [<f1>, ..., <f10>]
        }
      }

   Response schema (JSON):

      {
        "match_score": <float>,
        "matched_profile_hash": "<sha256-hex>",
        "audit_hash": "<sha256-hex>"
      }

3.3.  Xchange (Open Semantic Arbitration)

   Xchange performs neutral arbitration of competing text-based
   answers and evidence corpora.

   Endpoint: POST /v1/warf/xchange

   Request schema (JSON):

      {
        "query_id": "<string>",
        "query_text": "<string>",
        "packages": [
          {
            "agent_id": "<sha256-hex>",
            "answer_text": "<string>",
            "answer_tokens": ["<token>", ...],
            "corpus": [
              {"doc_id": "<string>", "tokens": ["<token>", ...]}
            ]
          },
          ...
        ],
        "reason_address": "<reason:// URI> | null",
        "benign_kappa_95th": <float>
      }

   Response schema (JSON):

      {
        "query_id": "<string>",
        "winner": {
          "agent_id": "<sha256-hex>",
          "score": <float>
        },
        "all_scores": {
          "<sha256-hex>": <float>,
          ...
        },
        "audit_hash": "<sha256-hex>",
        "balmathic_kappa": <float>,
        "vase_reward": <float>,
        "promote_to_reason_dot": <boolean>,
        "reason_dot_uri": "<string> | null"
      }

   Promotion to reason:// is automatic and decided internally by
   Xtend based on Balmathic kappa acceleration. The caller MUST supply
   the exact reason:// URI in the reason_address field if promotion
   is desired. If no valid reason_address is supplied, no promotion
   occurs regardless of kappa.

4.  Cargo Package Schema

   All flows share the outer cargo package envelope.

   Common fields:

      Field           Type        Required  Description
      ------------    --------    --------  ---------------------------
      exchange_id     string      REQUIRED  UUID for this transaction
      query_id        string      REQUIRED  Task or question identifier
      timestamp       string      REQUIRED  ISO-8601 UTC timestamp
      domain          string      REQUIRED  Namespace domain tag
      flow_type       string      REQUIRED  "xfer" | "xact" | "xchange"
      payload         object      REQUIRED  Flow-specific payload

5.  Xtend: Automatic Quality Gate and reason:// Bridge

   Xtend is the automatic quality gate that runs immediately after
   Xchange arbitration. It is not a separate caller-triggered step.

   After a winner is determined, Xtend:

   1. Computes structural convergence of the winner against the
      historical corpus for the task_hash.

   2. Applies Balmathic kappa to the cumulative convergence series to
      detect accelerating improvement.

   3. If the caller supplied a valid reason_address AND kappa exceeds
      the promotion threshold (default 1.15, or the caller-supplied
      benign_kappa_95th), the winning artifact is promoted to the
      reason:// registry at the exact URI provided by the caller.

   The Xport node validates the URI format but does not generate,
   modify, or assign meaning to the URI. Promotion is strictly gated
   by the supplied reason_address and the kappa threshold.

   The Xtend result (kappa, vase_reward, promotion decision, and
   reason_dot_uri if promoted) is returned directly in the Xchange
   response.

   The scoring logic for Balmathic kappa and VASE reward is implemented
   by a conformant scoring service and is protected under [WARF-PATENT]
   and [PCF-PATENT].  Implementations MUST NOT bypass Xtend or
   implement their own promotion logic.

6.  The reason:// Namespace

   reason:// is a URI scheme for discoverable, versioned reasoning
   artifacts. Format: reason://{domain}/{category}/{task}

   Examples:
      reason://industrial/fault/bearing-outer-race
      reason://medicine/diagnosis/sepsis-early

   Artifacts are immutable once promoted. Versioning is managed via
   the audit hash chain. Namespace gating is enforced at the Xport
   level.

7.  Security Considerations

   Promotion to the reason:// registry is controlled exclusively by
   the Xtend pipeline and the caller-supplied reason_address. The
   Xport node does not generate URIs or make semantic judgements.

   The audit chain relies on SHA-256. Implementations should be
   prepared to migrate to a stronger hash if collision attacks
   become practical.

   Agent identifiers are submitted as SHA-256 hashes. Raw identifiers
   MUST NOT be transmitted or stored.

8.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions at this time. Registration of
   the reason:// URI scheme is covered in [REASON-ID] and is planned
   for a subsequent revision of that document.

9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in
              RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, May 2017.

9.2.  Informative References

   [REASON-ID]
              Westerbeck, J., "reason:// -- A URI Scheme and Registry
              Protocol for Validated Agent Reasoning Artifacts",
              draft-westerbeck-reason-protocol-00, March 30, 2026.

   [WARF-PATENT]
              Westerbeck, J., "Methods and Systems for Domain-Agnostic
              Structural Analysis of Sequential Token Streams Using
              Positionally-Weighted Mutual Information Tensors",
              U.S. Provisional Patent 64/012,735, Filed March 22, 2026.

   [PCF-PATENT]
              Westerbeck, J., "Energy-Efficient Natural Language
              Processing Using Positional Correlation Fields",
              U.S. Provisional Patent 63/978,633,
              Filed February 9, 2026.

Author's Address

   Jacob Westerbeck
   Astrognosy AI / Pacific Intelligence Concepts
   Email: jacob@pcfic.com
   URI: https://astrognosy.com