How about something like this:

"Using this type of exchange enables Riak to compare a balanced tree of Riak object hashes. Any differences at a higher level in the hierarchy means that at least one value has changed at a lower level. AAE recursively compares the tree, level by level, until it pinpoints the exact values with a difference between nodes. The result is that AAE is able to efficiently run repair operations regardless of how many objects are stored in a cluster, since it need only actually repair specific objects."