Evaluation of Byzantine-Robust Gradient Aggregation for Computer Agriculture Yield Consortia Under Malicious Extension Agents: An Artificial Intelligence Convergence Bound for Governance Audit Trails

The problem is framed as a Byzantine fault-tolerance question for federated gradient aggregation, but the contribution is a governance-theoretic one: the paper derives a convergence bound that specifies how many malicious extension agents a yield consortium can tolerate before the aggregated model's error ceases to be bounded, and it shows that this bound has a direct institutional interpretation as an audit-trail sufficiency condition. The analysis is theoretical and methodological. It combines a standard Byzantine-robust aggregation rule with a convergence argument for non-convex objectives, then translates the resulting tolerance threshold into a governance requirement about the number and independence of audit witnesses that a consortium must maintain. The main result is that the tolerance threshold is not a fixed fraction of participants but depends on the ratio of between-cluster to within-cluster variance in yield outcomes, which means that consortia operating in heterogeneous agro-ecological zones face a stricter audit requirement than homogeneous ones. The paper concludes that governance audit trails for computer agriculture consortia should be designed around variance heterogeneity rather than around participant counts alone.