Decision Coherence: A Formal Correctness Requirement for Multi-Agent Systems

As AI agents move from s into production, a class of correctness bugs is emerging that existing system design vocabulary doesn't fully describe. The bugs look like race conditions, but they aren't races in the traditional sense. They look like stale reads, but the individual systems involved are internally consistent. They look like pipeline lag, but faster pipelines don't fix them. A paper published in January 2026 (arXi:2601.17019) formalizes the underlying problem as a single correctness requirement: Decision Coherence.