Fengqing Jiang, Yichen Feng, Yuetai Li, Luyao Niu, Basel Alomair, Radha Poovendran. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yuetai Li, Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Luyao Niu, Bill Yuchen Lin, Xiang Yue, Radha Poovendran. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

In this paper, we propose a modularized framework for communication processes applicable to crash and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. We abstract basic communication components and show that the communication process of the classic consensus protocols such as RAFT, single-decree Paxos, PBFT, and Hotstuff, can be represented by the combination of communication components. Based on the proposed framework, we develop an approach to analyze the consensus reliability of different protocols, where link loss and node failure are measured as a probability. We propose two latency optimization methods and implement a RAFT system to verify our theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed latency optimization methods. We also discuss decreasing consensus failure rate by adjusting protocol designs. This paper provides theoretical guidance for the design of future consensus systems with a low consensus failure rate and latency under the possible communication loss.

Yuetai Li, Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Dinuka Sahabandu, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Radha Poovendran. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

This paper investigates the multi-valued fault-tolerant distributed consensus problem that pursues exact output. To this end, the voting validity, which requires the consensus output of non-faulty nodes to be the exact plurality of the input of non-faulty nodes, is investigated. Considering a specific distribution of non-faulty votes, we first give the impossibility results and a tight lower bound of system tolerance achieving agreement, termination and voting validity. A practical consensus algorithm that satisfies voting validity in the Byzantine fault model is proposed subsequently. To ensure the exactness of outputs in any non-faulty vote distribution, we further propose safety-critical tolerance and a corresponding protocol that prioritizes voting validity over termination property. To refine the proposed protocols, we propose an incremental threshold algorithm that accelerates protocol operation speed. We also optimize consensus algorithms with the local broadcast model to enhance the protocol’s fault tolerance ability.

The centralized system becomes less efficient, secure, and resilient as the network size and heterogeneity increase due to its inherent single point of failure issues. Distributed consensus mechanisms characterized by decentralization, autonomy, parallelism, and fault-tolerance can meet the increasing demands of safety and security in critical interconnected systems. This article establishes a Node and Link probabilistic failure model in the presence of node and communication link failures for a representative crash fault-tolerant distributed consensus protocol: RAFT. The analytical results in terms of the probability density function and the mean value of consensus reliability are derived. Two important reliability performance indicators, Reliability Gain and Tolerance Gain are proposed to indicate the linear relationship between the consensus reliability and two basic parameters, i.e., the joint failure rate and the maximum number of tolerant faulty nodes, which provide the theoretical guidance for quickly deploying an RAFT system. The special case of a distributed consensus network with already a certain number of failures and its adverse impact are evaluated. The Markov probabilistic models, definitions of Reliability Gain and Tolerance Gain, and the analysis methods proposed in this article can be extended to other consensus mechanisms.