Publications related to Decentralization

Altruism, reciprocity, and tokens to reward forwarding data: Is that fair?

Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Arman Babaei

Decentralized storage networks offer services with intriguing possibilities to reduce inequalities in an extremely centralized market. Fair distribution of rewards, however, is still a persistent problem in the current generation of decentralized applicati ...

2024

Identification of typical district configurations: A two-step global sensitivity analysis framework

François Maréchal, Jonas Schnidrig, Cédric Terrier

The recent geopolitical conflicts in Europe have underscored the vulnerability of the current energy system to the volatility of energy carrier prices. In the prospect of defining robust energy systems ensuring sustainable energy supply in the future, the ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Towards General-Purpose Decentralized Computing with Permissionless Extensibility

Enis Ceyhun Alp

Smart contracts have emerged as the most promising foundations for applications of the blockchain technology. Even though smart contracts are expected to serve as the backbone of the next-generation web, they have several limitations that hinder their wide ...

EPFL2024

Architecture of a decentralised decision support system for futuristic beehives

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills

Honeybees are essential to human society, providing pollination services globally as well as producing honey and other valuable products. Effective management of apiaries should not only rely on beekeeper knowledge and skill, but also incorporate new infor ...

2024

Graph Exploration for Effective Multiagent Q-Learning

Ali H. Sayed, Ainur Zhaikhan

This article proposes an exploration technique for multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) with graph-based communication among agents. We assume that the individual rewards received by the agents are independent of the actions by the other agents, while ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

On the (In)security of Peer-to-Peer Decentralized Machine Learning

Carmela González Troncoso, Mathilde Aliénor Raynal, Dario Pasquini

In this work, we carry out the first, in-depth, privacy analysis of Decentralized Learning-a collaborative machine learning framework aimed at addressing the main limitations of federated learning. We introduce a suite of novel attacks for both passive and ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Time vs. Truth: Age-Distortion Tradeoffs and Strategies for Distributed Inference

Yunus Inan

In 1948, Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory, which grew out of a study to find the ultimate limits of source compression, and of reliable communication. Since then, information theory has proved itself not only as a quest to find the ...

EPFL2023

Coordinating Active Distribution Networks with Multi-Microgrids: An ADMM-based Decentralized Adjustable Robust Operation Model

Yuning Jiang

This paper proposes a decentralized adjustable robust operation model achieving the coordinated operation between an active distribution network (ADN) and microgrids (MGs). Thanks to the autonomous characteristic and heterogeneity of the individual agents ...

IEEE2022

Infochain: A Decentralized, Trustless and Transparent Oracle on Blockchain

Boi Faltings, Naman Goel, Aris Filos Ratsikas

Blockchain based systems allow various kinds of financial transactions to be executed in a decentralized manner. However, these systems often rely on a trusted third party (oracle) to get correct information about the real-world events, which trigger the f ...

2022

Flash Freezing Flash Boys: Countering Blockchain Front-Running

Bryan Alexander Ford, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Haoqian Zhang

Front-running, the practice of benefiting from advanced knowledge of pending transactions, has proliferated in the cryptocurrency space with the emergence of decentralized finance. Front-running causes devastating losses to honest participants-estimated at ...

IEEE2022

Revisiting Tendermint: Design Tradeoffs, Accountability, and Practical Use

Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, Zarko Milosevic, Dragos-Adrian Seredinschi

Tendermint is a deterministic consensus protocol and is one of the most mature implementations of its kind. This implementation is used as the core for building State Machine Replication (SMR) platforms with Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) guarantees. A not ...

IEEE2022

Heterogeneity in decentralized asset markets

Julien Hugonnier

We study a canonical model of decentralized exchange for a durable good or asset, where agents are assumed to have time-varying, heterogeneous utility types. Whereas the existing literature has focused on the special case of two types, we allow agents' uti ...

ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY2022

Dif-MAML: Decentralized Multi-Agent Meta-Learning

Ali H. Sayed, Mert Kayaalp, Stefan Vlaski

The objective of meta-learning is to exploit knowledge obtained from observed tasks to improve adaptation to unseen tasks. Meta-learners are able to generalize better when they are trained with a larger number of observed tasks and with a larger amount of ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Opinion Formation over Adaptive Networks

Virginia Bordignon

An adaptive network consists of multiple communicating agents, equipped with sensing and learning abilities that allow them to extract meaningful information from measurements. The objective of the network is to solve a global inference problem in a decent ...

EPFL2022

Exploiting environmental signals to enable policy correlation in large-scale decentralized systems

Boi Faltings, Zeki Doruk Erden, Panayiotis Danassis

Can artificial agents benefit from human conventions? Human societies manage to successfully self-organize and resolve the tragedy of the commons in common-pool resources, in spite of the bleak prediction of non-cooperative game theory. On top of that, rea ...

SPRINGER2022

Consensus Control for Decentralized Deep Learning

Martin Jaggi, Tao Lin, Sebastian Urban Stich, Anastasiia Koloskova, Lingjing Kong

Decentralized training of deep learning models enables on-device learning over networks, as well as efficient scaling to large compute clusters. Experiments in earlier works reveal that, even in a data-center setup, decentralized training often suffers fro ...

JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH2021

Microfluidics and cell-free synthetic biology in the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic platforms

Grégoire Michielin

In phenylketonuria, absence or malfunction of the phenylalanine hydroxylase enzyme results in toxic accumulation of phenylalanine in the body. An injectable recombinant enzyme therapy was recently approved and has the potential to improve the quality of li ...

EPFL2021

CALYPSO: Private Data Management for Decentralized Ledgers

Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Enis Ceyhun Alp

Distributed ledgers provide high availability and integrity, making them a key enabler for practical and secure computation of distributed workloads among mutually distrustful parties. Many practical applications also require strong confidentiality, howeve ...

2021

Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning

Martin Jaggi, Sebastian Urban Stich, Yang Liu, Lie He, Ayfer Özgür Aydin, Florian Tramèr, Qiang Yang, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Badih Ghazi

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g., mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g., service provider), while keeping the training data decen ...

NOW PUBLISHERS INC2021

Privacy-preserving photo sharing based on blockchain

Touradj Ebrahimi, Pablo Pfister

Sharing photos online has become an extremely popular activity, raising a wide concern on privacy issues related to the shared content. ProShare, a photo-sharing solution developed by Multimedia Signal Processing Group of EPFL addresses some of these priva ...

SPIE-INT SOC OPTICAL ENGINEERING2020