Related papers: Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too!
Consensus algorithms provide strategies to solve problems in a distributed system with the added constraint that data can only be shared between adjacent computing nodes. We find these algorithms in applications for wireless and sensor…
This paper is concerned with the problem of controlling a system of constrained dynamic subsystems in a way that balances the performance degradation of decentralized control with the practical cost of centralized control. We propose a…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…
Distributed averaging is among the most relevant cooperative control problems, with applications in sensor and robotic networks, distributed signal processing, data fusion, and load balancing. Consensus and gossip algorithms have been…
In distributed ML applications, shared parameters are usually replicated among computing nodes to minimize network overhead. Therefore, proper consistency model must be carefully chosen to ensure algorithm's correctness and provide high…
An imprecise Bayesian nonparametric approach to system reliability with multiple types of components is developed. This allows modelling partial or imperfect prior knowledge on component failure distributions in a flexible way through…
Consensus is a most fundamental task in distributed computing. This paper studies the consensus problem for a set of processes connected by a dynamic directed network, in which computation and communication is lock-step synchronous but…
Estimating the probability of failure for expensive simulations is a central task in reliability analysis for structural design, power grid design, and safety certification, among other areas. This work derives credible intervals on the…
Gossip protocols are popular methods for average consensus problems in distributed computing. We prove new convergence guarantees for a variety of such protocols, including path, clique, and synchronous pairwise gossip. These arise by…
Probabilistic inference problems arise naturally in distributed systems such as sensor networks and teams of mobile robots. Inference algorithms that use message passing are a natural fit for distributed systems, but they must be robust to…
Two types of general nonlinear consensus protocols are considered in this paper, namely the systems with nonlinear measurement and communication of the agents' states, respectively. The solutions of the systems are understood in the sense…
This work interprets and generalizes consensus-type algorithms as switching dynamics leading to symmetrization of some vector variables with respect to the actions of a finite group. We show how the symmetrization framework we develop…
A cryptographic protocol (CP) is a distributed algorithm designed to provide a secure communication in an insecure environment. CPs are used, for example, in electronic payments, electronic voting procedures, database access systems, etc.…
As far as we know, a useful quantum computer will require fault-tolerant gates, and existing schemes demand a prohibitively large space and time overhead. We argue that a first generation quantum computer will be very valuable to design,…
This paper presents the first generic compiler that transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless consensus protocol. For each of the following properties, if the initial permissioned protocol satisfies…
Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms are at the core of providing safety and liveness guarantees for distributed systems that must operate in the presence of arbitrary failures. Recently, numerous new BFT algorithms have been…
Fault-tolerant complexes describe surface-code fault-tolerant protocols from a single geometric object. We first introduce fusion complexes that define a general family of fusion-based quantum computing (FBQC) fault-tolerant quantum…
Mobile inventory, mobile commerce, banking and/or commercial applications are some distinctive examples that increasingly use distributed transactions. It is inevitably harder to design efficient commit protocols, due to some intrinsic…
In recent decades, the RAFT distributed consensus algorithm has become a main pillar of the distributed systems ecosystem, ensuring data consistency and fault tolerance across multiple nodes. Although the fact that RAFT is well known for…