Related papers: Lower Bounds on the State Complexity of Population…
Efficient planning in continuous state and action spaces is fundamentally hard, even when the transition model is deterministic and known. One way to alleviate this challenge is to perform bilevel planning with abstractions, where a…
Developing and enforcing study protocols is crucial in medical research, especially as interactions with participants become more intricate. Traditional rules-based systems struggle to provide the automation and flexibility required for…
In the process of collectively inventing new words for new concepts in a population, conflicts can quickly become numerous, in the form of synonymy and homonymy. Remembering all of them could cost too much memory, and remembering too few…
This paper studies the complexity of languages of finite words using automata theory. To go beyond the class of regular languages, we consider infinite automata and the notion of state complexity defined by Karp. Motivated by the seminal…
Sorting has a natural generalization where the input consists of: (1) a ground set $X$ of size $n$, (2) a partial oracle $O_P$ specifying some fixed partial order $P$ on $X$ and (3) a linear oracle $O_L$ specifying a linear order $L$ that…
In this work, we study the following basic question: "How much parallelism does a distributed task permit?" Our definition of parallelism (or symmetry) here is not in terms of speed, but in terms of identical roles that processes have at…
In population protocols, the underlying distributed network consists of $n$ nodes (or agents), denoted by $V$, and a scheduler that continuously selects uniformly random pairs of nodes to interact. When two nodes interact, their states are…
We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them. The…
Over the years, population protocols with the goal of reaching consensus have been studied in great depth. However, many systems in the real-world do not result in all agents eventually reaching consensus, but rather in the opposite: they…
In this paper, we consider the communication complexity of protocols that compute stable matchings. We work within the context of Gale and Shapley's original stable marriage problem\cite{GS62}: $n$ men and $n$ women each privately hold a…
An abstract architecture for idealized multi-agent systems whose behaviour is regulated by normative systems is developed and discussed. Agent choices are determined partially by the preference ordering of possible states and partially by…
We propose a new theoretical model for passively mobile Wireless Sensor Networks. We call it the PALOMA model, standing for PAssively mobile LOgarithmic space MAchines. The main modification w.r.t. the Population Protocol model is that…
We study the self-stabilizing leader election problem in anonymous $n$-nodes networks. Achieving self-stabilization with low space memory complexity is particularly challenging, and designing space-optimal leader election algorithms remains…
We study Plurality Consensus in the Gossip Model over a network of $n$ anonymous agents. Each agent supports an initial opinion or color. We assume that at the onset, the number of agents supporting the plurality color exceeds that of the…
The state complexity of the result of a regular operation is often positively correlated with the number of distinct transformations induced by letters in the minimal deterministic finite automaton of the input languages. That is, more…
We fully characterize self-stabilizing functions in population protocols for complete interaction graphs. In particular, we investigate self-stabilization in systems of $n$ finite state agents in which a malicious scheduler selects an…
This paper addresses decision-aiding problems that involve multiple objectives and uncertain states of the world. Inspired by the capability approach, we focus on cases where a policy maker chooses an act that, combined with a state of the…
Primitive Optimality Theory (OTP) (Eisner, 1997a; Albro, 1998), a computational model of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), employs a finite state machine to represent the set of active candidates at each stage of an Optimality…
Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated…
We present and explore a model of stateless and self-stabilizing distributed computation, inspired by real-world applications such as routing on today's Internet. Processors in our model do not have an internal state, but rather interact by…