Related papers: Diversity, Fairness, and Sustainability in Populat…
We consider the problem of multi-choice majority voting in a network of $n$ agents where each agent initially selects a choice from a set of $K$ possible choices. The agents try to infer the choice in majority merely by performing local…
Due to the recent cases of algorithmic bias in data-driven decision-making, machine learning methods are being put under the microscope in order to understand the root cause of these biases and how to correct them. Here, we consider a basic…
When users access shared resources in a selfish manner, the resulting societal cost and perceived users' cost is often higher than what would result from a centrally coordinated optimal allocation. While several contributions in mechanism…
Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where…
In this paper, we focus on the uniform bipartition problem in the population protocol model. This problem aims to divide a population into two groups of equal size. In particular, we consider the problem in the context of \emph{arbitrary}…
The problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible items is a well-known challenge in the field of (computational) social choice. In this scenario, there is a fundamental incompatibility between notions of fairness (such as envy-freeness…
Evolutionary multitasking has recently emerged as a novel paradigm that enables the similarities and/or latent complementarities (if present) between distinct optimization tasks to be exploited in an autonomous manner simply by solving them…
Numerous algorithms have been produced for the fundamental problem of clustering under many different notions of fairness. Perhaps the most common family of notions currently studied is group fairness, in which proportional group…
Population protocols have been introduced as a model of sensor networks consisting of very limited mobile agents with no control over their own movement. A population protocol corresponds to a collection of anonymous agents, modeled by…
Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by…
We consider the fundamental problem of assigning distinct labels to agents in the probabilistic model of population protocols. Our protocols operate under the assumption that the size $n$ of the population is embedded in the transition…
Many ant species employ distributed population density estimation in applications ranging from quorum sensing [Pra05], to task allocation [Gor99], to appraisal of enemy colony strength [Ada90]. It has been shown that ants estimate density…
In this study, we synthesize a novel dynamical approach for ant colonies enabling them to migrate to new nest sites in a self-organizing fashion. In other words, we realize ant colony migration as a self-organizing phenotype-level…
The population protocol model describes a network of anonymous agents that interact asynchronously in pairs chosen at random. Each agent starts in the same initial state $s$. We introduce the *dynamic size counting* problem: approximately…
Population protocols [Angluin et al., PODC, 2004] are a model of distributed computation in which indistinguishable, finite-state agents interact in pairs to decide if their initial configuration, i.e., the initial number of agents in each…
Equitability is a well-studied fairness notion in fair division, where an allocation is equitable if all agents receive equal utility from their allocation. For indivisible items, an exactly equitable allocation may not exist, and a natural…
A population protocol can be viewed as a sequence of pairwise interactions of $n$ agents (nodes). During one interaction, two agents selected uniformly at random update their states by applying a specified deterministic transition function.…
We study exact majority consensus in the population protocol model. In this model, the system is described by a graph $G = (V,E)$ with $n$ nodes, and in each time step, a scheduler samples uniformly at random a pair of adjacent nodes to…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
Randomized experiments have been the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of a treatment or policy. The classical complete randomization approach assigns treatments based on a prespecified probability and may lead to inefficient…