Related papers: A Predictable Incentive Mechanism for TrueBit
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…
We consider schemes for obtaining truthful reports on a common but hidden signal from large groups of rational, self-interested agents. One example are online feedback mechanisms, where users provide observations about the quality of a…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has enabled strong post-training gains in domains such as math and coding, though many open-ended settings rely on rubric-based rewards. We study reward hacking in rubric-based RL, where a…
Modern mathematics is built on the idea that proofs should be translatable into formal proofs, whose validity is an objective question, decidable by a computer. Yet, in practice, proofs are informal and may omit many details. An agent…
Parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols have been suggested in the literature to improve the safety guarantees, transaction throughput and confirmation latencies of Nakamoto consensus. In this work, we first consider the existing parallel…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
Despite all the progress in quantum technologies over the last decade, there is still a dearth of practical applications for quantum computers with a small number of noisy qubits. The effort to show quantum supremacy has been largely…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a paradigm for leveraging human intelligence and activity to solve a wide range of tasks. However, strategic workers will find enticement in their self-interest to free-ride and attack in a crowdsourcing contest…
A new interactive quantum zero-knowledge protocol for identity authentication implementable in currently available quantum cryptographic devices is proposed and demonstrated. The protocol design involves a verifier and a prover knowing a…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
We introduce a protocol through which a pair of quantum mechanical devices may be used to generate n bits of true randomness from a seed of O(log n) uniform bits. The bits generated are certifiably random based only on a simple statistical…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…
In Reward Learning (ReL), we are given feedback on an unknown target reward, and the goal is to use this information to recover it in order to carry out some downstream application, e.g., planning. When the feedback is not informative…
Quantum computers are expected to offer substantial speedups over their classical counterparts and to solve problems that are intractable for classical computers. Beyond such practical significance, the concept of quantum computation opens…
Anti-piracy is fundamentally a procedure that relies on collecting data from the open anonymous population, so how to incentivize credible reporting is a question at the center of the problem. Industrial alliances and companies are running…
Does the proof-of-work protocol serve its intended purpose of supporting decentralized cryptocurrency mining? To address this question, we develop a game-theoretical model where miners first invest in hardware to improve the efficiency of…