Related papers: Generic Selfish Mining MDP for DAG Protocols
Caching content over CDNs or at the network edge has been solidified as a means to improve network cost and offer better streaming experience to users. Furthermore, nudging the users towards low-cost content has recently gained momentum as…
In this paper we consider neighborhood load balancing in the context of selfish clients. We assume that a network of n processors and m tasks is given. The processors may have different speeds and the tasks may have different weights. Every…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
Efficient contact tracing and isolation is an effective strategy to control epidemics. It was used effectively during the Ebola epidemic and successfully implemented in several parts of the world during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. An…
Differentially private distributed mean estimation (DP-DME) is a fundamental building block in privacy-preserving federated learning, where a central server estimates the mean of $d$-dimensional vectors held by $n$ users while ensuring…
Training with differential privacy (DP) provides a guarantee to members in a dataset that they cannot be identified by users of the released model. However, those data providers, and, in general, the public, lack methods to efficiently…
Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives.…
Order fairness in distributed ledgers refers to properties that relate the order in which transactions are sent or received to the order in which they are eventually finalized, i.e., totally ordered. The study of such properties is…
Local differential privacy (LDP) provides a way for an untrusted data collector to aggregate users' data without violating their privacy. Various privacy-preserving data analysis tasks have been studied under the protection of LDP, such as…
Here, we explore the problem of error propagation mitigation in modular digital twins as a sequential decision process. Building on a companion study that used a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to infer latent error regimes from surrogate-physics…
The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…
Bitcoin mining is a wasteful and resource-intensive process. To add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners spend a considerable amount of energy. The Bitcoin protocol, named 'proof of work' (PoW), resembles a lottery and the…
Contextual bandit algorithms are useful in personalized online decision-making. However, many applications such as personalized medicine and online advertising require the utilization of individual-specific information for effective…
While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…
In this paper we develop a linear expectile hidden Markov model for the analysis of cryptocurrency time series in a risk management framework. The methodology proposed allows to focus on extreme returns and describe their temporal evolution…
We investigate the problem of designing optimal stealthy poisoning attacks on the control channel of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This research is motivated by the recent interest of the research community for adversarial and poisoning…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…
In this paper we explore several contexts where an adversary has an upper hand over the defender by using special hardware in an attack. These include password processing, hard-drive protection, cryptocurrency mining, resource sharing, code…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…