Related papers: Reductions in Distributed Computing Part II: k-Thr…
In this article, we propose a new approach, optimize then agree for minimizing a sum $ f = \sum_{i=1}^n f_i(x)$ of convex objective functions over a directed graph. The optimize then agree approach decouples the optimization step and the…
Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…
We introduce constraints necessary for type checking a higher-order concurrent constraint language, and solve them with an incremental algorithm. Our constraint system extends rational unification by constraints x$\subseteq$ y saying that…
Consensus is a well-studied problem in distributed sensing, computation and control, yet deriving useful and easily computable bounds on the rate of convergence to consensus remains a challenge. This paper discusses the use of seminorms for…
In this paper, we study the relationship between resilience and accuracy in the resilient distributed multi-dimensional consensus problem. We consider a network of agents, each of which has a state in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Some agents in the…
The alignment of autonomous agents with human values is a pivotal challenge when deploying these agents within physical environments, where safety is an important concern. However, defining the agent's objective as a reward and/or cost…
Part I of this paper considered 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…
The classic Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson impossibility proof demonstrates that any deterministic protocol for consensus in either a message-passing or shared-memory system must violate at least one of termination, validity, or agreement in…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
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…
We study a new online assignment problem, called the Online Task Assignment with Controllable Processing Time. In a bipartite graph, a set of online vertices (tasks) should be assigned to a set of offline vertices (machines) under the known…
Consensus is one of the most thoroughly studied problems in distributed computing, yet there are still complexity gaps that have not been bridged for decades. In particular, in the classical message-passing setting with processes' crashes,…
Meta-learning methods have shown an impressive ability to train models that rapidly learn new tasks. However, these methods only aim to perform well in expectation over tasks coming from some particular distribution that is typically…
Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…
We study two fundamental problems of distributed computing, consensus and approximate agreement, through a novel approach for proving lower bounds and impossibility results, that we call the asynchronous speedup theorem. For a given…
In the $\varepsilon$-Consensus-Halving problem, a fundamental problem in fair division, there are $n$ agents with valuations over the interval $[0,1]$, and the goal is to divide the interval into pieces and assign a label "$+$" or "$-$" to…
This paper formalizes a widely used dynamical class--replicator-mutator dynamics and Price-style selection-and-transmission--and makes explicit the modeling choices (scale, atomic unit, interaction topology, transmission kernel) that…
In distributed applications, such as energy demand forecasting at the substation level or federated learning, a large number of related tasks must be learned by different models, while the exact task relationships are unknown. We propose…
We show that for any odd $k$ and any instance of the Max-kXOR constraint satisfaction problem, there is an efficient algorithm that finds an assignment satisfying at least a $\frac{1}{2} + \Omega(1/\sqrt{D})$ fraction of constraints, where…
Iterative thresholding algorithms seek to optimize a differentiable objective function over a sparsity or rank constraint by alternating between gradient steps that reduce the objective, and thresholding steps that enforce the constraint.…