Related papers: Pseudo-MDPs: A Novel Framework for Efficiently Opt…
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…
Strategic mining attacks, such as selfish mining, exploit blockchain consensus protocols by deviating from honest behavior to maximize rewards. Markov Decision Process (MDP) analysis faces scalability challenges in modern digital economics,…
This work applies reinforcement learning (RL) from the AI machine learning field to derive an optimal Bitcoin-like blockchain mining strategy without knowing the details of the blockchain network model. Previously, the most profitable…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a powerful framework for modeling sequential decision-making problems with model uncertainty. This paper proposes the first first-order framework for solving robust MDPs. Our algorithm interleaves…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…
We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…
The pursuit of robustness has recently been a popular topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet the existing methods generally suffer from efficiency issues that obstruct their real-world implementation. In this paper, we introduce…
Metric Differential Privacy (mDP) extends the concept of Differential Privacy (DP) to serve as a new paradigm of data perturbation. It is designed to protect secret data represented in general metric space, such as text data encoded as word…
Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…
We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) describe sequential decision-making processes; MDP policies return for every state in that process an advised action. Classical algorithms can efficiently compute policies that are optimal with respect to,…
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents a pivotal challenge within the Ethereum ecosystem; it impacts the fairness, security, and efficiency of both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) networks. MEV arises when miners or validators manipulate…
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…
In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework of pyramid Markov processes to solve some open and fundamental problems of blockchain selfish mining under a rigorous mathematical setting. We first describe a more general model of…
Blockchain validators can reduce block processing time by exploiting multi-core CPUs, but deterministic execution must preserve a given total order while respecting transaction conflicts and per-block runtime limits. This paper…
Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…