Related papers: Prrr: Personal Random Rewards for Blockchain Repor…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
Blockchains have recently gained popularity thanks to their ability to record "digital truth". They are designed to keep persistence, security, and avoid attacks which is useful for many applications. However, they are still problematic in…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, are increasingly adopting layer-2 scaling solutions to improve transaction throughput and reduce fees. One popular layer-2 approach is the Optimistic Rollup, which relies on a mechanism known as a…
Propose-Test-Release (PTR) is a differential privacy framework that works with local sensitivity of functions, instead of their global sensitivity. This framework is typically used for releasing robust statistics such as median or trimmed…
Empirical data shows that in the absence of incentives, a peer participating in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network wishes to free-riding. Most solutions for providing incentives in P2P networks are based on direct reciprocity, which are not…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
This paper advocates a new paradigm Personalized Empirical Risk Minimization (PERM) to facilitate learning from heterogeneous data sources without imposing stringent constraints on computational resources shared by participating devices. In…
The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
For permissionless blockchains, scalability is paramount. While current technologies still fail to address this problem fully, many research works propose sharding or other techniques that extensively adopt parallel processing of…
Private record linkage (PRL) is the problem of identifying pairs of records that are similar as per an input matching rule from databases held by two parties that do not trust one another. We identify three key desiderata that a PRL…
With the increasing importance of data privacy, Local Differential Privacy (LDP) has recently become a strong measure of privacy for protecting each user's privacy from data analysts without relying on a trusted third party. In this paper,…
Correctness is an emergent property of systems where exposing error is cheaper than committing it. In dynamic, low-trust environments, autonomous AI agents benefit from delegating work to sub-agents, yet correctness cannot be assured…
We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…
In this paper, we consider the problem of generating fair randomness in a deterministic, multi-agent context (for instance, a decentralised game built on a blockchain). The existing state-of-the-art approaches are either susceptible to…
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…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…
Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks are not independent of their peers, and the network efficiency depends on peers contributing resources. Because shared resources are not free, this contribution must be rewarded. Peers across the network may…