arXiv subjects

Zhixuan Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhixuan Fang.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

TIPS: Transaction Inclusion Protocol with Signaling in DAG-based Blockchain

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a popular approach to achieve scalability of blockchain networks. Due to its high efficiency in data communication and great scalability, DAG has been widely adopted in many applications such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). DAG-based blockchain, nevertheless, faces the key challenge of transaction inclusion collision due to the high concurrency and the network delay. Particularly, the transaction inclusion collision in DAG-based blockchain leads to the revenue and throughput dilemmas, which would greatly degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose "TIPS", the Transaction Inclusion Protocol with Signaling, which broadcasts a signal indicating the transactions in the block. We show that with the prompt broadcast of a signal, TIPS substantially reduces the transaction collision and thus resolves these dilemmas. Moreover, we show that TIPS can defend against both the denial-of-service and the delay-of-service attacks. We also conduct intensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed protocol.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Simultaneously Achieving Sublinear Regret and Constraint Violations for Online Convex Optimization with Time-varying Constraints

In this paper, we develop a novel virtual-queue-based online algorithm for online convex optimization (OCO) problems with long-term and time-varying constraints and conduct a performance analysis with respect to the dynamic regret and constraint violations. We design a new update rule of dual variables and a new way of incorporating time-varying constraint functions into the dual variables. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first parameter-free algorithm to simultaneously achieve sublinear dynamic regret and constraint violations. Our proposed algorithm also outperforms the state-of-the-art results in many aspects, e.g., our algorithm does not require the Slater condition. Meanwhile, for a group of practical and widely-studied constrained OCO problems in which the variation of consecutive constraints is smooth enough across time, our algorithm achieves $O(1)$ constraint violations. Furthermore, we extend our algorithm and analysis to the case when the time horizon $T$ is unknown. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to validate the theoretical guarantees of our algorithm, and some applications of our proposed framework will be outlined.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

An Incentive Mechanism for Sustainable Blockchain Storage

Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from ever-increasing storage costs, which in general have not been properly compensated by the users' transaction fees. This reduces the incentives for the miners' participation and may jeopardize the blockchain security. We propose to mitigate this blockchain insufficient fee issue through a Fee and Waiting Tax (FWT) mechanism, which explicitly considers the two types of negative externalities in the system. Specifically, we model the interactions between the protocol designer, users, and miners as a three-stage Stackelberg game. By characterizing the equilibrium of the game, we find that miners neglecting the negative externality in transaction selection cause they are willing to accept insufficient-fee transactions. This leads to the insufficient storage fee issue in the existing protocol. Moreover, our proposed optimal FWT mechanism can motivate users to pay sufficient transaction fees to cover the storage costs and achieve the unconstrained social optimum. Numerical results show that the optimal FWT mechanism guarantees sufficient transaction fees and achieves an average social welfare improvement of 33.73\% or more over the existing protocol. Furthermore, the optimal FWT mechanism achieves the maximum fairness index and performs well even under heterogeneous-storage-cost miners.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2020

Incentive Mechanism Design for Distributed Coded Machine Learning

A distributed machine learning platform needs to recruit many heterogeneous worker nodes to finish computation simultaneously. As a result, the overall performance may be degraded due to straggling workers. By introducing redundancy into computation, coded machine learning can effectively improve the runtime performance by recovering the final computation result through the first $k$ (out of the total $n$) workers who finish computation. While existing studies focus on designing efficient coding schemes, the issue of designing proper incentives to encourage worker participation is still under-explored. This paper studies the platform's optimal incentive mechanism for motivating proper workers' participation in coded machine learning, despite the incomplete information about heterogeneous workers' computation performances and costs. A key contribution of this work is to summarize workers' multi-dimensional heterogeneity as a one-dimensional metric, which guides the platform's efficient selection of workers under incomplete information with a linear computation complexity. Moreover, we prove that the optimal recovery threshold $k$ is linearly proportional to the participator number $n$ if we use the widely adopted MDS (Maximum Distance Separable) codes for data encoding. We also show that the platform's increased cost due to incomplete information disappears when worker number is sufficiently large, but it does not monotonically decrease in worker number.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2018

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Rebalancing Dockless Bike Sharing Systems

Bike sharing provides an environment-friendly way for traveling and is booming all over the world. Yet, due to the high similarity of user travel patterns, the bike imbalance problem constantly occurs, especially for dockless bike sharing systems, causing significant impact on service quality and company revenue. Thus, it has become a critical task for bike sharing systems to resolve such imbalance efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning framework for incentivizing users to rebalance such systems. We model the problem as a Markov decision process and take both spatial and temporal features into consideration. We develop a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm called Hierarchical Reinforcement Pricing (HRP), which builds upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm. Different from existing methods that often ignore spatial information and rely heavily on accurate prediction, HRP captures both spatial and temporal dependencies using a divide-and-conquer structure with an embedded localized module. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate HRP, based on a dataset from Mobike, a major Chinese dockless bike sharing company. Results show that HRP performs close to the 24-timeslot look-ahead optimization, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both service level and bike distribution. It also transfers well when applied to unseen areas.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

Loyalty Programs in the Sharing Economy: Optimality and Competition

Loyalty programs are important tools for sharing platforms seeking to grow supply. Online sharing platforms use loyalty programs to heavily subsidize resource providers, encouraging participation and boosting supply. As the sharing economy has evolved and competition has increased, the design of loyalty programs has begun to play a crucial role in the pursuit of maximal revenue. In this paper, we first characterize the optimal loyalty program for a platform with homogeneous users. We then show that optimal revenue in a heterogeneous market can be achieved by a class of multi-threshold loyalty program (MTLP) which admits a simple implementation-friendly structure. We also study the performance of loyalty programs in a setting with two competing sharing platforms, showing that the degree of heterogeneity is a crucial factor for both loyalty programs and pricing strategies. Our results show that sophisticated loyalty programs that reward suppliers via stepwise linear functions outperform simple sign-up bonuses, which give them a one time reward for participating.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2016

Prices and Subsidies in the Sharing Economy

The growth of the sharing economy is driven by the emergence of sharing platforms, e.g., Uber and Lyft, that match owners looking to share their resources with customers looking to rent them. The design of such platforms is a complex mixture of economics and engineering, and how to "optimally" design such platforms is still an open problem. In this paper, we focus on the design of prices and subsidies in sharing platforms. Our results provide insights into the tradeoff between revenue maximizing prices and social welfare maximizing prices. Specifically, we introduce a novel model of sharing platforms and characterize the profit and social welfare maximizing prices in this model. Further, we bound the efficiency loss under profit maximizing prices, showing that there is a strong alignment between profit and efficiency in practical settings. Our results highlight that the revenue of platforms may be limited in practice due to supply shortages; thus platforms have a strong incentive to encourage sharing via subsidies. We provide an analytic characterization of when such subsidies are valuable and show how to optimize the size of the subsidy provided. Finally, we validate the insights from our analysis using data from Didi Chuxing, the largest ridesharing platform in China.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2016

Market Share Analysis with Brand Effect

In this paper, we investigate the effect of brand in market competition. Specifically, we propose a variant Hotelling model where companies and customers are represented by points in an Euclidean space, with axes being product features. $N$ companies compete to maximize their own profits by optimally choosing their prices, while each customer in the market, when choosing sellers, considers the sum of product price, discrepancy between product feature and his preference, and a company's brand name, which is modeled by a function of its market area of the form $-β\cdot\text{(Market Area)}^q$, where $β$ captures the brand influence and $q$ captures how market share affects the brand. By varying the parameters $β$ and $q$, we derive existence results of Nash equilibrium and equilibrium market prices and shares. In particular, we prove that pure Nash equilibrium always exists when $q=0$ for markets with either one and two dominating features, and it always exists in a single dominating feature market when market affects brand name linearly, i.e., $q=1$. Moreover, we show that at equilibrium, a company's price is proportional to its market area over the competition intensity with its neighbors, a result that quantitatively reconciles the common belief of a company's pricing power. We also study an interesting "wipe out" phenomenon that only appears when $q>0$, which is similar to the "undercut" phenomenon in the Hotelling model, where companies may suddenly lose the entire market area with a small price increment. Our results offer novel insight into market pricing and positioning under competition with brand effect.

cs.GT↗