We explore combining batch order-fair atomic broadcast (of-ABC) and frequent batch auction (FBA) as a defense against general order manipulations in blockchain-based decentralized exchanges (DEX). To justify FBA, we compare the welfare loss of decentralized exchanges under two market designs: continuous limit order book (CLOB), where transactions are processed sequentially, and FBA, where transactions are arranged into batches and a uniform price double auction decides execution order. We model three types of players, common investors, privately informed traders, and arbitrageurs who can provide liquidity and front-run, along with a decentralized exchange. Assuming that the exchange is realized over an of-ABC protocol, we find that FBA can achieve better social welfare compared to CLOB when (1) public information affecting the fundamental value of an asset is revealed more frequently, or (2) the block generation interval is sufficiently large, or (3) the priority fees are small compared to the asset price changes, or (4) fewer privately informed parties exist. Intrinsic reasons are that first, blockchains already treat time as discrete and ensuring order fairness there is non-trivial, allowing even more room for latency arbitrage rents under CLOB; second, sufficiently large block creation interval allows for information dispersion; third, higher priority fees discourage front-running under CLOB; additionally, FBA prioritizes price in deciding execution order and fewer informed traders mean less adverse price impact.
Additive Noise Models (ANM) encode a popular functional assumption that enables learning causal structure from observational data. Due to a lack of real-world data meeting the assumptions, synthetic ANM data are often used to evaluate causal discovery algorithms. Reisach et al. (2021) show that, for common simulation parameters, a variable ordering by increasing variance is closely aligned with a causal order and introduce var-sortability to quantify the alignment. Here, we show that not only variance, but also the fraction of a variable's variance explained by all others, as captured by the coefficient of determination $R^2$, tends to increase along the causal order. Simple baseline algorithms can use $R^2$-sortability to match the performance of established methods. Since $R^2$-sortability is invariant under data rescaling, these algorithms perform equally well on standardized or rescaled data, addressing a key limitation of algorithms exploiting var-sortability. We characterize and empirically assess $R^2$-sortability for different simulation parameters. We show that all simulation parameters can affect $R^2$-sortability and must be chosen deliberately to control the difficulty of the causal discovery task and the real-world plausibility of the simulated data. We provide an implementation of the sortability measures and sortability-based algorithms in our library CausalDisco (//github.com/CausalDisco/CausalDisco).
The Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) is a recently proposed metric for real-time remote monitoring systems. In particular, AoII measures the time the information at the monitor is incorrect, weighted by the magnitude of this incorrectness, thereby combining the notions of freshness and distortion. This paper addresses the definition of an AoII-optimal transmission policy in a discrete-time communication scheme with a resource constraint and a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol. Considering an $N$-ary symmetric Markov source, the problem is formulated as an infinite-horizon average-cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). The source model is characterized by the cardinality of the state space and the probability of staying at the same state. Interestingly, it is proved that under some conditions, the optimal transmission policy is to never transmit. This reveals that there exists a region of the source dynamics where communication is inadequate in reducing the AoII. Elsewhere, there exists an optimal transmission policy, which is a randomized mixture of two discrete threshold-based policies that randomize at one state. The optimal threshold and the randomization component are derived analytically. Numerical results illustrate the impact of source dynamics, channel conditions, and the resource constraint on the average AoII.
In many real world situations, like minor traffic offenses in big cities, a central authority is tasked with periodic administering punishments to a large number of individuals. Common practice is to give each individual a chance to suffer a smaller fine and be guaranteed to avoid the legal process with probable considerably larger punishment. However, thanks to the large number of offenders and a limited capacity of the central authority, the individual risk is typically small and a rational individual will not choose to pay the fine. Here we show that if the central authority processes the offenders in a publicly known order, it properly incentives the offenders to pay the fine. We show analytically and on realistic experiments that our mechanism promotes non-cooperation and incentives individuals to pay. Moreover, the same holds for an arbitrary coalition. We quantify the expected total payment the central authority receives, and show it increases considerably.
We generalize several propositional preprocessing techniques to higher-order logic, building on existing first-order generalizations. These techniques eliminate literals, clauses, or predicate symbols from the problem, with the aim of making it more amenable to automatic proof search. We also introduce a new technique, which we call quasipure literal elimination, that strictly subsumes pure literal elimination. The new techniques are implemented in the Zipperposition theorem prover. Our evaluation shows that they sometimes help prove problems originating from Isabelle formalizations and the TPTP library.
Weak supervision overcomes the label bottleneck, enabling efficient development of training sets. Millions of models trained on such datasets have been deployed in the real world and interact with users on a daily basis. However, the techniques that make weak supervision attractive -- such as integrating any source of signal to estimate unknown labels -- also ensure that the pseudolabels it produces are highly biased. Surprisingly, given everyday use and the potential for increased bias, weak supervision has not been studied from the point of view of fairness. This work begins such a study. Our departure point is the observation that even when a fair model can be built from a dataset with access to ground-truth labels, the corresponding dataset labeled via weak supervision can be arbitrarily unfair. Fortunately, not all is lost: we propose and empirically validate a model for source unfairness in weak supervision, then introduce a simple counterfactual fairness-based technique that can mitigate these biases. Theoretically, we show that it is possible for our approach to simultaneously improve both accuracy and fairness metrics -- in contrast to standard fairness approaches that suffer from tradeoffs. Empirically, we show that our technique improves accuracy on weak supervision baselines by as much as 32% while reducing demographic parity gap by 82.5%.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
We consider the problem of discovering $K$ related Gaussian directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where the involved graph structures share a consistent causal order and sparse unions of supports. Under the multi-task learning setting, we propose a $l_1/l_2$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for learning $K$ linear structural equation models. We theoretically show that the joint estimator, by leveraging data across related tasks, can achieve a better sample complexity for recovering the causal order (or topological order) than separate estimations. Moreover, the joint estimator is able to recover non-identifiable DAGs, by estimating them together with some identifiable DAGs. Lastly, our analysis also shows the consistency of union support recovery of the structures. To allow practical implementation, we design a continuous optimization problem whose optimizer is the same as the joint estimator and can be approximated efficiently by an iterative algorithm. We validate the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the joint estimator in experiments.
Games and simulators can be a valuable platform to execute complex multi-agent, multiplayer, imperfect information scenarios with significant parallels to military applications: multiple participants manage resources and make decisions that command assets to secure specific areas of a map or neutralize opposing forces. These characteristics have attracted the artificial intelligence (AI) community by supporting development of algorithms with complex benchmarks and the capability to rapidly iterate over new ideas. The success of artificial intelligence algorithms in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II have also attracted the attention of the military research community aiming to explore similar techniques in military counterpart scenarios. Aiming to bridge the connection between games and military applications, this work discusses past and current efforts on how games and simulators, together with the artificial intelligence algorithms, have been adapted to simulate certain aspects of military missions and how they might impact the future battlefield. This paper also investigates how advances in virtual reality and visual augmentation systems open new possibilities in human interfaces with gaming platforms and their military parallels.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.