Related papers: Incentive Attacks in BTC: Short-Term Revenue Chang…
A growing body of evidence has shown that incorporating behavioral economics principles into the design of financial incentive programs helps improve their cost-effectiveness, promote individuals' short-term engagement, and increase…
Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10…
In most popular public accessible cryptocurrency systems, the mining pool plays a key role because mining cryptocurrency with the mining pool turns the non-profitable situation into profitable for individual miners. In many recent novel…
Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
In blockchain-based order book systems, buyers and sellers trade assets, while it is miners to match them and include their transactions in the blockchain. It is found that many miners behave selfishly and myopically, prioritizing…
Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial…
We study adversarial attacks that manipulate the reward signals to control the actions chosen by a stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithm. We propose the first attack against two popular bandit algorithms: $\epsilon$-greedy and UCB,…
Cashback reward programs now serve as central instruments in the competitive landscape of cards, digital wallets, and payment platforms. Despite their financial significance, the business logic governing these programs is seldom treated as…
This study investigates behavior-targeted attacks on reinforcement learning and their countermeasures. Behavior-targeted attacks aim to manipulate the victim's behavior as desired by the adversary through adversarial interventions in state…
BitTorrent is a widely-deployed, peer-to-peer file transfer protocol engineered with a "tit for tat" mechanism that encourages cooperation. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for nodes to altruistically provide service to their peers…
Adversarial training in reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because perturbations cascade through trajectories and compound over time, making fixed-strength attacks either overly destructive or too conservative. We propose…
Games are challenging for Reinforcement Learning~(RL) agents due to their reward-sparsity, as rewards are only obtainable after long sequences of deliberate actions. Intrinsic Motivation~(IM) methods -- which introduce exploration rewards…
Deep Reinforcement Learning solutions have been applied to different control problems with outperforming and promising results. In this research work we have applied Proximal Policy Optimization, Soft Actor-Critic and Generative Adversarial…
As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi), propelled by Blockchain technology, has revolutionized traditional financial systems, improving transparency, reducing costs, and fostering financial inclusion. However, transaction activities in these systems…
In this paper, we explore the partitioning attacks on the Bitcoin network, which is shown to exhibit spatial bias, and temporal and logical diversity. Through data-driven study we highlight: 1) the centralization of Bitcoin nodes across…
Delayed rewards problem in contextual bandits has been of interest in various practical settings. We study randomized allocation strategies and provide an understanding on how the exploration-exploitation tradeoff is affected by delays in…