Related papers: On the Importance of Registers for Computability

Many organizations describe their processes as consensus-driven, but there is no consensus on the definition of consensus. Qualitative definitions of consensus prioritize social phenomena like "unity" that are not necessarily measurable.…

We are given a set of elements in a metric space. The distribution of the elements is arbitrary, possibly adversarial. Can we weigh the elements in a way that is resistant to such (adversarial) manipulations? This problem arises in various…

The aggressive application of scalar replacement to array references substantially reduces the number of memory operations at the expense of a possibly very large number of registers. In this paper we describe a register allocation…

In large scale systems such as the Internet, replicating data is an essential feature in order to provide availability and fault-tolerance. Attiya and Welch proved that using strong consistency criteria such as atomicity is costly as each…

The paper shows that matching without replacement on propensity scores produces estimators that generally are inconsistent for the average treatment effect of the treated. To achieve consistency, practitioners must either assume that no…

Ensembling has a long history in statistical data analysis, with many impactful applications. However, in many modern machine learning settings, the benefits of ensembling are less ubiquitous and less obvious. We study, both theoretically…

Decentralized systems can be more resistant to operator mischief than centralized ones, but they are substantially harder to develop, deploy, and maintain. This cost is dramatically reduced if the decentralized part of the system can be…

The structure of many real-world systems is best captured by networks consisting of several interaction layers. Understanding how a multi-layered structure of connections affects the synchronization properties of dynamical systems evolving…

The parsimony score of a character on a tree equals the number of state changes required to fit that character onto the tree. We show that for unordered, reversible characters this score equals the number of tree rearrangements required to…

Quality assessments of models in unsupervised learning and clustering verification in particular have been a long-standing problem in the machine learning research. The lack of robust and universally applicable cluster validity scores often…

We address the classical problem of hierarchical clustering, but in a framework where one does not have access to a representation of the objects or their pairwise similarities. Instead, we assume that only a set of comparisons between…

The alignment of a set of objects by means of transformations plays an important role in computer vision. Whilst the case for only two objects can be solved globally, when multiple objects are considered usually iterative methods are used.…

In this paper we study the notion of synchronization from the point of view of combinatorics. As a first step, we address the quantitative problem of counting the number of executions of simple processes interacting with synchronization…

Ranked decision systems -- recommenders, ad auctions, clinical triage queues -- must decide when to intervene in ranked outputs and when to abstain. We study when confidence-based abstention monotonically improves decision quality, and when…

Unwritten languages today often have no official grammar, and are rather governed by "unspoken rules". Similarly, we argue that the young discipline of networking is still a practice that lacks a deep understanding of the rules that govern…

Image registration is a widespread problem which applies models about image transformation or image similarity to align discrete images of the same scene. Nevertheless, the theoretical limits on its accuracy are not understood even in the…

For tabletop rearrangement problems with overhand grasps, storage space outside the tabletop workspace, or buffers, can temporarily hold objects which greatly facilitates the resolution of a given rearrangement task. This brings forth the…

We study the classical Election problem in anonymous net- works, where solutions can rely on the use of random bits, which may be either shared or unshared among nodes. We provide a complete char- acterization of the conditions under which…

In the fully-anonymous (shared-memory) model, inspired by a biological setting, processors have no identifiers and memory locations are anonymous. This means that there is no pre-existing agreement among processors on any naming of the…

A shared read/write register emulation provides the illusion of shared-memory on top of message-passing models. The main hurdle with such emulations is dealing with server faults in the system. Several crash-tolerant register emulations in…