为去中心化建立统一定义,解决系统分析中的模糊问题。
Defining Decentralization: An Ontological Perspective
- 用图结构本体论定义去中心化为关系性、主体相关的属性。
- 提出抗空洞性与不可渗透性两个可量化指标。
- 适用于联邦学习、区块链等系统,支持自动评估。
去中心化作为计算机科学中的概念已存在半个世纪以上,尽管在安全、分布式计算、人工智能、云基础设施和物联网架构等领域具有基础性作用,但目前仍缺乏适用于各类计算机通信系统的普适定义。这一缺失在去中心化人工智能与机器学习范式(如协同训练、分布式推理、基于区块链的AI及智能体AI)兴起后愈发严重,去中心化常被当作核心设计目标,但现有方法往往将其与信任分布或特定实现范式混淆。这种模糊性导致系统分析不一致,削弱了通信架构与协议设计的形式化推理严谨性。本文将此问题定义为‘去中心化问题’,分析其形式语义、认识论与实践基础,提出一种基于图的本体论,将去中心化定义为计算机通信系统的关联性与主体特异性属性。该框架明确区分去中心化与分布,并引入两项新度量:空洞容错性(Void Tolerance)与不可渗透性(Imperviousness),支持自动化分类与度量计算。在联邦学习与区块链架构上的实例化表明,该框架能提供一致且可比的评估结果,而传统定义常产生不完整或矛盾结论,为跨异构系统的去中心化分析提供了领域无关的基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Decentralization as a concept in computer science has existed for over half a century. Despite its fundamental role across domains such as security, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, there remains no universally accepted definition of decentralization applicable across computer communication systems. This has become increasingly problematic with the emergence of decentralized AI and machine learning paradigms, including collaborative training, distributed inference, blockchain-based, and agentic AI, where decentralization is often treated as a core design objective. Meanwhile, existing approaches frequently conflate decentralization with related notions such as distribution of trust or specific implementation paradigms. Such ambiguity creates inconsistencies in system analysis, limits comparability between works, and weakens the rigor of formal reasoning surrounding communication architectures and protocol design. In this work, we define this research gap as the Decentralization Problem. We analyze the formal-semantic, epistemological, and pragmatic foundations of decentralization and introduce a graph-based ontology defining it as both relational and subject-specific property of computer communication systems. The framework formally distinguishes decentralization from distribution and supports evaluation through two novel metrics: Void Tolerance and Imperviousness. We also provide a browser-based implementation that enables automated classification and metric computation of arbitrary systems. Instantiations to federated learning and blockchain architectures show consistent, comparable assessments where existing definitions produce incomplete or contradictory conclusions, providing a domain-independent foundation for analysing decentralization across heterogeneous systems.
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