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A New Approach to Distributed Hypothesis Testing and Non-Bayesian Learning: Improved Learning Rate and Byzantine-Resilience

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
 [1];  [2];  [1]
  1. Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States)
  2. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque, NM, and Livermore, CA (United States)

Here, we study a setting where a group of agents, each receiving partially informative private signals, seek to collaboratively learn the true underlying state of the world (from a finite set of hypotheses) that generates their joint observation profiles. To solve this problem, we propose a distributed learning rule that differs fundamentally from existing approaches, in that it does not employ any form of “belief-averaging”. Instead, agents update their beliefs based on a min-rule. Under standard assumptions on the observation model and the network structure, we establish that each agent learns the truth asymptotically almost surely. As our main contribution, we prove that with probability 1, each false hypothesis is ruled out by every agent exponentially fast, at a network-independent rate that is strictly larger than existing rates. We then develop a computationally-efficient variant of our learning rule that is provably resilient to agents who do not behave as expected (as represented by a Byzantine adversary model) and deliberately try to spread misinformation.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
Grant/Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000; NA0003525
OSTI ID:
1670177
Report Number(s):
SAND--2020-6169J; 686731
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control Journal Issue: 9 Vol. 66; ISSN 0018-9286
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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