Related papers: Population Protocols for Exact Plurality Consensus…
We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically,…
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation in which an arbitrary number of indistinguishable finite-state agents interact in pairs to decide some property of their initial configuration. We investigate the behaviour of…
The convergence rate is a crucial issue in opinion dynamics, which characterizes how quickly opinions reach a consensus and tells when the collective behavior can be formed. However, the key factors that determine the convergence rate of…
Consider n individuals who, by popular vote, choose among q >= 2 alternatives, one of which is "better" than the others. Assume that each individual votes independently at random, and that the probability of voting for the better…
This paper shows that every leader election protocol requires logarithmic stabilization time both in expectation and with high probability in the population protocol model. This lower bound holds even if each agent has knowledge of the…
In this paper, a new randomized response technique aimed at protecting respondents' privacy is proposed. It is designed for estimating the population total, or the population mean, of a quantitative characteristic. It provides a~high degree…
Privacy-preserving average consensus aims to guarantee the privacy of initial states and asymptotic consensus on the exact average of the initial value. In existing work, it is achieved by adding and subtracting variance decaying and…
In the $k$-committee election problem, we wish to aggregate the preferences of $n$ agents over a set of alternatives and select a committee of $k$ alternatives that minimizes the cost incurred by the agents. While we typically assume that…
In the deterministic binary majority process we are given a simple graph where each node has one out of two initial opinions. In every round, every node adopts the majority opinion among its neighbors. By using a potential argument first…
In several real \emph{Multi-Agent Systems} (MAS), it has been observed that only weaker forms of\emph{metastable consensus} are achieved, in which a large majority of agents agree on some opinion while other opinions continue to be…
Random selection, leader election, and collective coin flipping are fundamental tasks in fault-tolerant distributed computing. We study these problems in the full-information model where despite decades of study, key gaps remain in our…
We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…
In populations with community structure, the formation of consensus requires both alignment within and diffusion of beliefs across groups, processes that evolve on distinct time scales. How do modularity, asymmetry, and polarization shape…
We introduce a new multiple type I error criterion for clinical trials with multiple populations. Such trials are of interest in precision medicine where the goal is to develop treatments that are targeted to specific sub-populations…
A population-based optimization algorithm was designed, inspired by two main thinking modes in philosophy, both based on dialectic concept and thesis-antithesis paradigm. They impose two different kinds of dialectics. Idealistic and…
Consider a distributed graph where each vertex holds one of two distinct opinions. In this paper, we are interested in synchronous voting processes where each vertex updates its opinion according to a predefined common local updating rule.…
Fault-tolerant consensus is about reaching agreement on some of the input values in a limited time by non-faulty autonomous processes, despite of failures of processes or communication medium. This problem is particularly challenging and…