We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are the leaders who assign a computing power to be consumed by miners. In stage II, miners decide of their power consumption and distribution. They find themselves in a social dilemma in which they must choose between mining in solo, therefore prioritizing their individual preferences, and participating in a pool for the collective interest. The model relies on a pool protocol based on a simulated game in which the miners compete for the reward won by the pool. The solutions for the stage I sub-game and the simulated protocol game are unique and stable Nash equilibriums while the stage II sub-game leads to a stable cooperative equilibrium only when miners choose their strategies according to certain criteria. We conclude that the cooperative optimal mining model has the potential to favor Bitcoin decentralization and stability. Mainly, the social dilemma faced by miners together with the balance of incentives ensure a certain distribution of the network computing power between pools and solo miners, while equilibriums in the game solutions provide stability to the system.
In this paper, we consider several efficient data structures for the problem of sampling from a dynamically changing discrete probability distribution, where some prior information is known on the distribution of the rates, in particular the maximum and minimum rate, and where the number of possible outcomes N is large. We consider three basic data structures, the Acceptance-Rejection method, the Complete Binary Tree and the Alias method. These can be used as building blocks in a multi-level data structure, where at each of the levels, one of the basic data structures can be used, with the top level selecting a group of events, and the bottom level selecting an element from a group. Depending on assumptions on the distribution of the rates of outcomes, different combinations of the basic structures can be used. We prove that for particular data structures the expected time of sampling and update is constant when the rate distribution follows certain conditions. We show that for any distribution, combining a tree structure with the Acceptance-Rejection method, we have an expected time of sampling and update of $O\left(\log\log{r_{max}}/{r_{min}}\right)$ is possible, where $r_{max}$ is the maximum rate and $r_{min}$ the minimum rate. We also discuss an implementation of a Two Levels Acceptance-Rejection data structure, that allows expected constant time for sampling, and amortized constant time for updates, assuming that $r_{max}$ and $r_{min}$ are known and the number of events is sufficiently large. We also present an experimental verification, highlighting the limits given by the constraints of a real-life setting.
Following [21, 23], the present work investigates a new relative entropy-regularized algorithm for solving the optimal transport on a graph problem within the randomized shortest paths formalism. More precisely, a unit flow is injected into a set of input nodes and collected from a set of output nodes while minimizing the expected transportation cost together with a paths relative entropy regularization term, providing a randomized routing policy. The main advantage of this new formulation is the fact that it can easily accommodate edge flow capacity constraints which commonly occur in real-world problems. The resulting optimal routing policy, i.e., the probability distribution of following an edge in each node, is Markovian and is computed by constraining the input and output flows to the prescribed marginal probabilities thanks to a variant of the algorithm developed in [8]. In addition, experimental comparisons with other recently developed techniques show that the distance measure between nodes derived from the introduced model provides competitive results on semi-supervised classification tasks.
We study the problem of allocating m indivisible items to n agents with additive utilities. It is desirable for the allocation to be both fair and efficient, which we formalize through the notions of envy-freeness and Pareto-optimality. While envy-free and Pareto-optimal allocations may not exist for arbitrary utility profiles, previous work has shown that such allocations exist with high probability assuming that all agents' values for all items are independently drawn from a common distribution. In this paper, we consider a generalization of this model with asymmetric agents, where an agent's utilities for the items are drawn independently from a distribution specific to the agent. We show that envy-free and Pareto-optimal allocations are likely to exist in this asymmetric model when $m=\Omega\left(n\, \log n\right)$, matching the best bounds known for the symmetric subsetting. Empirically, an algorithm based on Maximum Nash Welfare obtains envy-free and Pareto-optimal allocations for small numbers of items.
We establish improved uniform error bounds for the time-splitting methods for the long-time dynamics of the Schr\"odinger equation with small potential and the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE) with weak nonlinearity. For the Schr\"odinger equation with small potential characterized by a dimensionless parameter $\varepsilon \in (0, 1]$ representing the amplitude of the potential, we employ the unitary flow property of the (second-order) time-splitting Fourier pseudospectral (TSFP) method in $L^2$-norm to prove a uniform error bound at $C(T)(h^m +\tau^2)$ up to the long time $T_\varepsilon= T/\varepsilon$ for any $T>0$ and uniformly for $0<\varepsilon\le1$, while $h$ is the mesh size, $\tau$ is the time step, $m \ge 2$ depends on the regularity of the exact solution, and $C(T) =C_0+C_1T$ grows at most linearly with respect to $T$ with $C_0$ and $C_1$ two positive constants independent of $T$, $\varepsilon$, $h$ and $\tau$. Then by introducing a new technique of {\sl regularity compensation oscillation} (RCO) in which the high frequency modes are controlled by regularity and the low frequency modes are analyzed by phase cancellation and energy method, an improved uniform error bound at $O(h^{m-1} + \varepsilon \tau^2)$ is established in $H^1$-norm for the long-time dynamics up to the time at $O(1/\varepsilon)$ of the Schr\"odinger equation with $O(\varepsilon)$-potential with $m \geq 3$, which is uniformly for $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$. Moreover, the RCO technique is extended to prove an improved uniform error bound at $O(h^{m-1} + \varepsilon^2\tau^2)$ in $H^1$-norm for the long-time dynamics up to the time at $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ of the cubic NLSE with $O(\varepsilon^2)$-nonlinearity strength, uniformly for $\varepsilon \in (0, 1]$. Extensions to the first-order and fourth-order time-splitting methods are discussed.
We study estimation of the conditional tail average treatment effect (CTATE), defined as a difference between conditional tail expectations of potential outcomes. The CTATE can capture heterogeneity and deliver aggregated local information of treatment effects over different quantile levels, and is closely related to the notion of second order stochastic dominance and the Lorenz curve. These properties render it a valuable tool for policy evaluations. We consider a semiparametric treatment effect framework under endogeneity for the CTATE estimation using a newly introduced class of consistent loss functions jointly for the conditioanl tail expectation and quantile. We establish asymptotic theory of our proposed CTATE estimator and provide an efficient algorithm for its implementation. We then apply the method to the evaluation of effects from participating in programs of the Job Training Partnership Act in the US.
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in domains such as healthcare, marketing or recommender systems to avoid deploying poor performing policies, as such policies may hart human lives or destroy the user experience. Thus, many OPE methods with theoretical backgrounds have been proposed. One emerging challenge with this trend is that a suitable estimator can be different for each application setting. It is often unknown for practitioners which estimator to use for their specific applications and purposes. To find out a suitable estimator among many candidates, we use a data-driven estimator selection procedure for off-policy policy performance estimators as a practical solution. As proof of concept, we use our procedure to select the best estimator to evaluate coupon treatment policies on a real-world online content delivery service. In the experiment, we first observe that a suitable estimator might change with different definitions of the outcome variable, and thus the accurate estimator selection is critical in real-world applications of OPE. Then, we demonstrate that, by utilizing the estimator selection procedure, we can easily find out suitable estimators for each purpose.
Scheduling decisions in parallel queuing systems arise as a fundamental problem, underlying the dimensioning and operation of many computing and communication systems, such as job routing in data center clusters, multipath communication, and Big Data systems. In essence, the scheduler maps each arriving job to one of the possibly heterogeneous servers while aiming at an optimization goal such as load balancing, low average delay or low loss rate. One main difficulty in finding optimal scheduling decisions here is that the scheduler only partially observes the impact of its decisions, e.g., through the delayed acknowledgements of the served jobs. In this paper, we provide a partially observable (PO) model that captures the scheduling decisions in parallel queuing systems under limited information of delayed acknowledgements. We present a simulation model for this PO system to find a near-optimal scheduling policy in real-time using a scalable Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. We numerically show that the resulting policy outperforms other limited information scheduling strategies such as variants of Join-the-Most-Observations and has comparable performance to full information strategies like: Join-the-Shortest-Queue, Join-the- Shortest-Queue(d) and Shortest-Expected-Delay. Finally, we show how our approach can optimise the real-time parallel processing by using network data provided by Kaggle.
Bid optimization for online advertising from single advertiser's perspective has been thoroughly investigated in both academic research and industrial practice. However, existing work typically assume competitors do not change their bids, i.e., the wining price is fixed, leading to poor performance of the derived solution. Although a few studies use multi-agent reinforcement learning to set up a cooperative game, they still suffer the following drawbacks: (1) They fail to avoid collusion solutions where all the advertisers involved in an auction collude to bid an extremely low price on purpose. (2) Previous works cannot well handle the underlying complex bidding environment, leading to poor model convergence. This problem could be amplified when handling multiple objectives of advertisers which are practical demands but not considered by previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-objective cooperative bid optimization formulation called Multi-Agent Cooperative bidding Games (MACG). MACG sets up a carefully designed multi-objective optimization framework where different objectives of advertisers are incorporated. A global objective to maximize the overall profit of all advertisements is added in order to encourage better cooperation and also to protect self-bidding advertisers. To avoid collusion, we also introduce an extra platform revenue constraint. We analyze the optimal functional form of the bidding formula theoretically and design a policy network accordingly to generate auction-level bids. Then we design an efficient multi-agent evolutionary strategy for model optimization. Offline experiments and online A/B tests conducted on the Taobao platform indicate both single advertiser's objective and global profit have been significantly improved compared to state-of-art methods.
The task of Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to automatically infer the missing fact information in Knowledge Graph (KG). In this paper, we take a new perspective that aims to leverage rich user-item interaction data (user interaction data for short) for improving the KGC task. Our work is inspired by the observation that many KG entities correspond to online items in application systems. However, the two kinds of data sources have very different intrinsic characteristics, and it is likely to hurt the original performance using simple fusion strategy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel adversarial learning approach by leveraging user interaction data for the KGC task. Our generator is isolated from user interaction data, and serves to improve the performance of the discriminator. The discriminator takes the learned useful information from user interaction data as input, and gradually enhances the evaluation capacity in order to identify the fake samples generated by the generator. To discover implicit entity preference of users, we design an elaborate collaborative learning algorithms based on graph neural networks, which will be jointly optimized with the discriminator. Such an approach is effective to alleviate the issues about data heterogeneity and semantic complexity for the KGC task. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on the KGC task.
We show that for the problem of testing if a matrix $A \in F^{n \times n}$ has rank at most $d$, or requires changing an $\epsilon$-fraction of entries to have rank at most $d$, there is a non-adaptive query algorithm making $\widetilde{O}(d^2/\epsilon)$ queries. Our algorithm works for any field $F$. This improves upon the previous $O(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ bound (SODA'03), and bypasses an $\Omega(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound of (KDD'14) which holds if the algorithm is required to read a submatrix. Our algorithm is the first such algorithm which does not read a submatrix, and instead reads a carefully selected non-adaptive pattern of entries in rows and columns of $A$. We complement our algorithm with a matching query complexity lower bound for non-adaptive testers over any field. We also give tight bounds of $\widetilde{\Theta}(d^2)$ queries in the sensing model for which query access comes in the form of $\langle X_i, A\rangle:=tr(X_i^\top A)$; perhaps surprisingly these bounds do not depend on $\epsilon$. We next develop a novel property testing framework for testing numerical properties of a real-valued matrix $A$ more generally, which includes the stable rank, Schatten-$p$ norms, and SVD entropy. Specifically, we propose a bounded entry model, where $A$ is required to have entries bounded by $1$ in absolute value. We give upper and lower bounds for a wide range of problems in this model, and discuss connections to the sensing model above.