Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen

Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen et al.

Interprocedural data-flow analyses form an expressive and useful paradigm of numerous static analysis applications, such as live variables analysis, alias analysis and null pointers analysis. The most widely-used framework for interprocedural data-flow analysis is IFDS, which encompasses distributive data-flow functions over a finite domain. On-demand data-flow analyses restrict the focus of the analysis on specific program locations and data facts. This setting provides a natural split between (i) an offline (or preprocessing) phase, where the program is partially analyzed and analysis summaries are created, and (ii) an online (or query) phase, where analysis queries arrive on demand and the summaries are used to speed up answering queries. In this work, we consider on-demand IFDS analyses where the queries concern program locations of the same procedure (aka same-context queries). We exploit the fact that flow graphs of programs have low treewidth to develop faster algorithms that are space and time optimal for many common data-flow analyses, in both the preprocessing and the query phase. We also use treewidth to develop query solutions that are embarrassingly parallelizable, i.e. the total work for answering each query is split to a number of threads such that each thread performs only a constant amount of work. Finally, we implement a static analyzer based on our algorithms, and perform a series of on-demand analysis experiments on standard benchmarks. Our experimental results show a drastic speed-up of the queries after only a lightweight preprocessing phase, which significantly outperforms existing techniques.

Guy Avni, Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen, Josef Tkadlec

In this paper we introduce and study {\em all-pay bidding games}, a class of two player, zero-sum games on graphs. The game proceeds as follows. We place a token on some vertex in the graph and assign budgets to the two players. Each turn, each player submits a sealed legal bid (non-negative and below their remaining budget), which is deducted from their budget and the highest bidder moves the token onto an adjacent vertex. The game ends once a sink is reached, and \PO pays \PT the outcome that is associated with the sink. The players attempt to maximize their expected outcome. Our games model settings where effort (of no inherent value) needs to be invested in an ongoing and stateful manner. On the negative side, we show that even in simple games on DAGs, optimal strategies may require a distribution over bids with infinite support. A central quantity in bidding games is the {\em ratio} of the players budgets. On the positive side, we show a simple FPTAS for DAGs, that, for each budget ratio, outputs an approximation for the optimal strategy for that ratio. We also implement it, show that it performs well, and suggests interesting properties of these games. Then, given an outcome $c$, we show an algorithm for finding the necessary and sufficient initial ratio for guaranteeing outcome $c$ with probability~$1$ and a strategy ensuring such. Finally, while the general case has not previously been studied, solving the specific game in which \PO wins iff he wins the first two auctions, has been long stated as an open question, which we solve.

Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen et al.

Crypto-currencies are digital assets designed to work as a medium of exchange, e.g., Bitcoin, but they are susceptible to attacks (dishonest behavior of participants). A framework for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies requires (a) modeling of game-theoretic aspects to analyze incentives for deviation from honest behavior; (b) concurrent interactions between participants; and (c) analysis of long-term monetary gains. Traditional game-theoretic approaches for the analysis of security protocols consider either qualitative temporal properties such as safety and termination, or the very special class of one-shot (stateless) games. However, to analyze general attacks on protocols for crypto-currencies, both stateful analysis and quantitative objectives are necessary. In this work our main contributions are as follows: (a) we show how a class of concurrent mean-payoff games, namely ergodic games, can model various attacks that arise naturally in crypto-currencies; (b) we present the first practical implementation of algorithms for ergodic games that scales to model realistic problems for crypto-currencies; and (c) we present experimental results showing that our framework can handle games with thousands of states and millions of transitions.

Krishnendu Chatterjee, Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen, Martin A. Nowak

Evolutionary graph theory studies the evolutionary dynamics in a population structure given as a connected graph. Each node of the graph represents an individual of the population, and edges determine how offspring are placed. We consider the classical birth-death Moran process where there are two types of individuals, namely, the residents with fitness 1 and mutants with fitness r. The fitness indicates the reproductive strength. The evolutionary dynamics happens as follows: in the initial step, in a population of all resident individuals a mutant is introduced, and then at each step, an individual is chosen proportional to the fitness of its type to reproduce, and the offspring replaces a neighbor uniformly at random. The process stops when all individuals are either residents or mutants. The probability that all individuals in the end are mutants is called the fixation probability. We present faster polynomial-time Monte-Carlo algorithms for finidng the fixation probability on undirected graphs. Our algorithms are always at least a factor O(n^2/log n) faster as compared to the previous algorithms, where n is the number of nodes, and is polynomial even if r is given in binary. We also present lower bounds showing that the upper bound on the expected number of effective steps we present is asymptotically tight for undirected graphs.

Alexander Zimin, Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen, Krishnendu Chatterjee

We consider the problem of minimizing the regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit, when the measure of goodness of an arm is not the mean return, but some general function of the mean and the variance.We characterize the conditions under which learning is possible and present examples for which no natural algorithm can achieve sublinear regret.