Related papers: Diversity, Fairness, and Sustainability in Populat…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
We present a stylized model with feedback loops for the evolution of a population's wealth over generations. Individuals have both talent and wealth: talent is a random variable distributed identically for everyone, but wealth is a random…
We focus on a uniform partition problem in a population protocol model. The uniform partition problem aims to divide a population into k groups of the same size, where k is a given positive integer. In the case of k=2 (called uniform…
Global coordination is required to solve a wide variety of challenging collective action problems from network colorings to the tragedy of the commons. Recent empirical study shows that the presence of a few noisy autonomous agents can…
Oscillations often take place in populations of decision makers that are either a coordinator, who takes action only if enough others do so, or an anticoordinator, who takes action only if few others do so. Populations consisting of…
We consider the problem of allocating divisible items among multiple agents, and consider the setting where any agent is allowed to introduce diversity constraints on the items they are allocated. We motivate this via settings where the…
Colonies of ants can collectively choose the best of several nests, even when many of the active ants who organize the move visit only one site. Understanding such a behavior can help us design efficient distributed decision making…
The concepts of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and multi-agent systems are two important areas of research in artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we present an approach that builds a CNN-based colony of AI agents to serve as…
Navigation through narrow passages during colony relocation by the tandem-running ants, $\textit{Diacamma}$ $\textit{indicum}$, is a tour de force of biological traffic coordination. Even on one-lane paths, the ants tactfully manage a…
Robots sometimes have to work together with a mixture of partially-aligned or conflicting goals. Flocking - coordinated motion through cohesion, alignment, and separation - traditionally assumes uniform desired inter-agent distances. Many…
We study a variation of the graph colouring problem on random graphs of finite average connectivity. Given the number of colours, we aim to maximise the number of different colours at neighbouring vertices (i.e. one edge distance) of any…
Multiple sequence alignment is a key process in today's biology, and finding a relevant alignment of several sequences is much more challenging than just optimizing some improbable evaluation functions. Our approach for addressing multiple…
We study uniform population protocols: networks of anonymous agents whose pairwise interactions are chosen at random, where each agent uses an identical transition algorithm that does not depend on the population size $n$. Many existing…
Population protocols are a fundamental model in distributed computing, where many nodes with bounded memory and computational power have random pairwise interactions over time. This model has been studied in a rich body of literature aiming…
The organizations of insect societies, such as division of labor, task allocation, collective regulation, mass action responses, have been considered as main reasons for the ecological success. In this article, we propose and study a…
We study the fair allocation of indivisible items subject to conflict constraints. In this framework, the items are represented as the vertices of a graph, with edges corresponding to conflicts between pairs of items. Each agent is assigned…
A colony of the queenless ant species, \emph{Pristomyrmex punctatus}, can broadly be seen as consisting of small-body sized worker ants and relatively larger body-sized cheater ants. Hence, in the presence of inter-colony migration, a set…
We examine multi-task benchmarks in machine learning through the lens of social choice theory. We draw an analogy between benchmarks and electoral systems, where models are candidates and tasks are voters. This suggests a distinction…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities…
Motivated by the increasing interest in the explicit representation and handling of various "preference" structures arising in modern digital economy, this work introduces a new class of "one-to-many stable-matching" problems where a set of…