Related papers: The computational power of population protocols
Methods like multi-agent reinforcement learning struggle to scale with growing population size. Mean-field games (MFGs) are a game-theoretic approach that can circumvent this by finding a solution for an abstract infinite population, which…
In open systems, i.e. systems operating in an environment that they cannot control and with components that may join or leave, behaviors can arise as side effects of intensive components interaction. Finding ways to understand and design…
As modern computing moves towards smaller devices and powerful cloud platforms, more and more computation is being delegated to powerful service providers. Interactive proofs are a widely-used model to design efficient protocols for…
Understanding how information can efficiently spread in distributed systems under noisy communications is a fundamental question in both biological research and artificial system design. When agents are able to control whom they interact…
We introduce a new model of spatial random multiple access systems with a non-standard departure policy: all arriving messages are distributed uniformly on a finite sphere in the space, and when a successful transmission of a single message…
We study the high-power asymptotic behavior of the sum-rate capacity of multi-user interference networks with an equal number of transmitters and receivers. We assume that each transmitter is cognizant of the message it wishes to convey to…
We give a topological simulation for tensor networks that we call the two-string model. In this approach we give a new way to design protocols, and we discover a new multipartite quantum communication protocol. We introduce the notion of…
We consider sojourn or response times in processor-shared queues that have a finite population of potential users. Computing the response time of a tagged customer involves solving a finite system of linear ODEs. Writing the system in…
Speakers communicate to influence their partner's beliefs and shape their actions. Belief- and action-based objectives have been explored independently in recent computational models, but it has been challenging to explicitly compare or…
Oblivious transfer is a powerful cryptographic primitive that is complete for secure multi-party computation. In oblivious transfer protocols a user sends one or more messages to a receiver, while the sender remains oblivious as to which…
This work studies sequential social learning (also known as Bayesian observational learning), and how private communication can enable agents to avoid herding to the wrong action/state. Starting from the seminal BHW (Bikhchandani,…
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…
Shannon theory models communication as the reliable transfer of symbol sequences, with performance governed by capacity and rate-distortion limits. When both endpoints possess strong predictors -- as in modern large language models and…
Population protocols are a formal model of sensor networks consisting of identical mobile devices. Two devices can interact and thereby change their states. Computations are infinite sequences of interactions in which the interacting…
Agent-based models of the binary naming game are generalized here to represent a family of models parameterized by the introduction of two continuous parameters. These parameters define varying listener-speaker interactions on the…
We study mechanism design for public-good provision under a noisy privacy-preserving transformation of individual agents' reported preferences. The setting is a standard binary model with transfers and quasi-linear utility. Agents report…
Political and advertising campaigns increasingly exploit social networks to spread information and persuade people. This paper studies a persuasion model to examine whether such a strategy is better than simply sending public signals.…
In the classic herding model, agents receive private signals about an underlying binary state of nature, and act sequentially to choose one of two possible actions, after observing the actions of their predecessors. We investigate what…
In this work we address the question of efficiency of distributed computing in anonymous, congested and highly dynamic and not-always-connected networks/systems. More precisely, the system consists of an unknown number of anonymous nodes…
We initiate the theory of communication complexity of individual inputs held by the agents, rather than worst-case or average-case. We consider total, partial, and partially correct protocols, one-way versus two-way, with and without help…