Related papers: Tiny Groups Tackle Byzantine Adversaries
The core premise of permissionless blockchains is their reliable and secure operation without the need to trust any individual agent. At the heart of blockchain consensus mechanisms is an explicit cost (whether work or stake) for…
Increasing the mini-batch size for stochastic gradient descent offers significant opportunities to reduce wall-clock training time, but there are a variety of theoretical and systems challenges that impede the widespread success of this…
A group of $n$ users want to run a distributed protocol $\pi$ over a network where communication occurs via private point-to-point channels. Unfortunately, an adversary, who knows $\pi$, is able to maliciously flip bits on the channels. Can…
Many complex systems, such as communication networks, display a surprising degree of robustness: while key components regularly malfunction, local failures rarely lead to the loss of the global information-carrying ability of the network.…
We consider the problem of detecting a small subset of defective items from a large set via non-adaptive "random pooling" group tests. We consider both the case when the measurements are noiseless, and the case when the measurements are…
In the classical combinatorial (adaptive) group testing problem, one is given two integers \(d\) and \(n\), where \(0\le d\le n\), and a population of \(n\) items, exactly \(d\) of which are known to be defective. The question is to devise…
We consider the problem of self-healing in peer-to-peer networks that are under repeated attack by an omniscient adversary. We assume that the following process continues for up to n rounds where n is the total number of nodes initially in…
Byzantine reliable broadcast is a powerful primitive that allows a set of processes to agree on a message from a designated sender, even if some processes (including the sender) are Byzantine. Existing broadcast protocols for this setting…
As far as we know, a useful quantum computer will require fault-tolerant gates, and existing schemes demand a prohibitively large space and time overhead. We argue that a first generation quantum computer will be very valuable to design,…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated wide adoption in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs). In GRPO, prompts are answered by the model and preferred behaviour is learnt via reinforcement learning. Owing to…
As collaborative learning allows joint training of a model using multiple sources of data, the security problem has been a central concern. Malicious users can upload poisoned data to prevent the model's convergence or inject hidden…
Given that data-dependent algorithmic systems have become impactful in more domains of life, the need for individuals to promote their own interests and hold algorithms accountable has grown. To have meaningful influence, individuals must…
The ordered transmission (OT) scheme reduces the number of transmissions needed in the network to make the final decision, while it maintains the same probability of error as the system without using OT scheme. In this paper, we investigate…
Ensuring that an AI system behaves reliably and as intended, especially in the presence of unexpected faults or adversarial conditions, is a complex challenge. Inspired by the field of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) from distributed…
Existing protocols for byzantine fault tolerant distributed systems usually rely on the correct agents' ability to detect faulty agents and/or to detect the occurrence of some event or action on some correct agent. In this paper, we provide…
Given a network in which some pairs of nodes can communicate freely, and some subsets of the nodes could be faulty and colluding to disrupt communication, when can messages reliably be sent from one given node to another? We give a new…
Group testing is a long studied problem in combinatorics: A small set of $r$ ill people should be identified out of the whole ($n$ people) by using only queries (tests) of the form "Does set X contain an ill human?". In this paper we…
We are interested in the design of generative networks. The training of these mathematical structures is mostly performed with the help of adversarial (min-max) optimization problems. We propose a simple methodology for constructing such…
We propose a definition of {\it security} and a definition of {\it robustness} of networks against the cascading failure models of deliberate attacks and random errors respectively, and investigate the principles of the security and…