Related papers: Reductions in Distributed Computing Part II: k-Thr…
In this paper, we present new second-order algorithms for composite convex optimization, called Contracting-domain Newton methods. These algorithms are affine-invariant and based on global second-order lower approximation for the smooth…
Consider the problem of computing quantized linear functions with only a few queries. Formally, given $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{R}^k$, our goal is to encode $\mathbf{x}$ as $\mathbf{c} \in \mathbb{R}^n$, for $n > k$, so that for any…
Determining the space complexity of $x$-obstruction-free $k$-set agreement for $x\leq k$ is an open problem. In $x$-obstruction-free protocols, processes are required to return in executions where at most $x$ processes take steps. The best…
Constrained Markov Decision Processes are a class of stochastic decision problems in which the decision maker must select a policy that satisfies auxiliary cost constraints. This paper extends upper confidence reinforcement learning for…
Distributed consensus has been widely studied for sensor network applications. Whereas the asymptotic convergence rate has been extensively explored in prior work, other important and practical issues, including energy efficiency and link…
Continual learning (CL) is concerned with learning multiple tasks sequentially without forgetting previously learned tasks. Despite substantial empirical advances over recent years, the theoretical development of CL remains in its infancy.…
We study the scalability of consensus-based distributed optimization algorithms by considering two questions: How many processors should we use for a given problem, and how often should they communicate when communication is not free?…
This paper considers optimization problems over networks where agents have individual objectives to meet, or individual parameter vectors to estimate, subject to subspace constraints that require the objectives across the network to lie in…
In many combinatorial problems one may need to model the diversity or similarity of assignments in a solution. For example, one may wish to maximise or minimise the number of distinct values in a solution. To formulate problems of this…
Distributed computing often gives rise to complex concurrent and interacting activities. In some cases several concurrent activities may be working together, i.e. cooperating, to solve a given problem; in other cases, the activities may be…
The safe-consensus task was introduced by Afek, Gafni and Lieber (DISC' 09) as a weakening of the classic consensus. When there is concurrency, the consensus output can be arbitrary, not even the input of any process. They showed that…
The popular isolation level Multiversion Read Committed (RC) trades some of the strong guarantees of serializability for increased transaction throughput. Sometimes, transaction workloads can be safely executed under RC obtaining…
The paper studies the problem of reaching agreement in a distributed message-passing system prone to crash failures. Crashes are generated by \constrained\ adversaries - a \wadapt\ adversary, who has to fix in advance the set of $f$…
We consider the adversarial online multi-task reinforcement learning setting, where in each of $K$ episodes the learner is given an unknown task taken from a finite set of $M$ unknown finite-horizon MDP models. The learner's objective is to…
In this work, we reimagine classical probing to evaluate knowledge transfer from simple source to more complex target tasks. Instead of probing frozen representations from a complex source task on diverse simple target probing tasks (as…
In this paper, we present convergence guarantees for a modified trust-region method designed for minimizing objective functions whose value and gradient and Hessian estimates are computed with noise. These estimates are produced by generic…
We study task selection to enhance sample efficiency in model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning (MAML-RL). Traditional meta-RL typically assumes that all available tasks are equally important, which can lead to task redundancy when they…
In the realm of robust optimization the k-adaptability approach is one promising method to derive approximate solutions for two-stage robust optimization problems. Instead of allowing all possible second-stage decisions, the k-adaptability…
Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We motivate the need…
We present an efficient reduction that converts any machine learning algorithm into an interactive protocol, enabling collaboration with another party (e.g., a human) to achieve consensus on predictions and improve accuracy. This approach…