2,682 research outputs found
Recycling Parrondo games
We consider a deterministic realization of Parrondo games and use periodic
orbit theory to analyze their asymptotic behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure
Resilient Autonomous Control of Distributed Multi-agent Systems in Contested Environments
An autonomous and resilient controller is proposed for leader-follower
multi-agent systems under uncertainties and cyber-physical attacks. The leader
is assumed non-autonomous with a nonzero control input, which allows changing
the team behavior or mission in response to environmental changes. A resilient
learning-based control protocol is presented to find optimal solutions to the
synchronization problem in the presence of attacks and system dynamic
uncertainties. An observer-based distributed H_infinity controller is first
designed to prevent propagating the effects of attacks on sensors and actuators
throughout the network, as well as to attenuate the effect of these attacks on
the compromised agent itself. Non-homogeneous game algebraic Riccati equations
are derived to solve the H_infinity optimal synchronization problem and
off-policy reinforcement learning is utilized to learn their solution without
requiring any knowledge of the agent's dynamics. A trust-confidence based
distributed control protocol is then proposed to mitigate attacks that hijack
the entire node and attacks on communication links. A confidence value is
defined for each agent based solely on its local evidence. The proposed
resilient reinforcement learning algorithm employs the confidence value of each
agent to indicate the trustworthiness of its own information and broadcast it
to its neighbors to put weights on the data they receive from it during and
after learning. If the confidence value of an agent is low, it employs a trust
mechanism to identify compromised agents and remove the data it receives from
them from the learning process. Simulation results are provided to show the
effectiveness of the proposed approach
Asymptotics of Fingerprinting and Group Testing: Tight Bounds from Channel Capacities
In this work we consider the large-coalition asymptotics of various
fingerprinting and group testing games, and derive explicit expressions for the
capacities for each of these models. We do this both for simple decoders (fast
but suboptimal) and for joint decoders (slow but optimal).
For fingerprinting, we show that if the pirate strategy is known, the
capacity often decreases linearly with the number of colluders, instead of
quadratically as in the uninformed fingerprinting game. For many attacks the
joint capacity is further shown to be strictly higher than the simple capacity.
For group testing, we improve upon known results about the joint capacities,
and derive new explicit asymptotics for the simple capacities. These show that
existing simple group testing algorithms are suboptimal, and that simple
decoders cannot asymptotically be as efficient as joint decoders. For the
traditional group testing model, we show that the gap between the simple and
joint capacities is a factor 1.44 for large numbers of defectives.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure
Robust Exponential Worst Cases for Divide-et-Impera Algorithms for Parity Games
The McNaughton-Zielonka divide et impera algorithm is the simplest and most
flexible approach available in the literature for determining the winner in a
parity game. Despite its theoretical worst-case complexity and the negative
reputation as a poorly effective algorithm in practice, it has been shown to
rank among the best techniques for the solution of such games. Also, it proved
to be resistant to a lower bound attack, even more than the strategy
improvements approaches, and only recently a family of games on which the
algorithm requires exponential time has been provided by Friedmann. An easy
analysis of this family shows that a simple memoization technique can help the
algorithm solve the family in polynomial time. The same result can also be
achieved by exploiting an approach based on the dominion-decomposition
techniques proposed in the literature. These observations raise the question
whether a suitable combination of dynamic programming and game-decomposition
techniques can improve on the exponential worst case of the original algorithm.
In this paper we answer this question negatively, by providing a robustly
exponential worst case, showing that no intertwining of the above mentioned
techniques can help mitigating the exponential nature of the divide et impera
approaches.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2017, arXiv:1709.0176
Collaboration in Social Networks
The very notion of social network implies that linked individuals interact
repeatedly with each other. This allows them not only to learn successful
strategies and adapt to them, but also to condition their own behavior on the
behavior of others, in a strategic forward looking manner. Game theory of
repeated games shows that these circumstances are conducive to the emergence of
collaboration in simple games of two players. We investigate the extension of
this concept to the case where players are engaged in a local contribution game
and show that rationality and credibility of threats identify a class of Nash
equilibria -- that we call "collaborative equilibria" -- that have a precise
interpretation in terms of sub-graphs of the social network. For large network
games, the number of such equilibria is exponentially large in the number of
players. When incentives to defect are small, equilibria are supported by local
structures whereas when incentives exceed a threshold they acquire a non-local
nature, which requires a "critical mass" of more than a given fraction of the
players to collaborate. Therefore, when incentives are high, an individual
deviation typically causes the collapse of collaboration across the whole
system. At the same time, higher incentives to defect typically support
equilibria with a higher density of collaborators. The resulting picture
conforms with several results in sociology and in the experimental literature
on game theory, such as the prevalence of collaboration in denser groups and in
the structural hubs of sparse networks
Markov modeling of moving target defense games
We introduce a Markov-model-based framework for Moving Target Defense (MTD) analysis. The framework allows modeling of broad range of MTD strategies, provides general theorems about how the probability of a successful adversary defeating an MTD strategy is related to the amount of time/cost spent by the adversary, and shows how a multi-level composition of MTD strategies can be analyzed by a straightforward combination of the analysis for each one of these strategies. Within the proposed framework we define the concept of security capacity which measures the strength or effectiveness of an MTD strategy: the security capacity depends on MTD specific parameters and more general system parameters. We apply our framework to two concrete MTD strategies
- …