We’re proud to unveil the Allora Network whitepaper, detailing the framework, innovations, and vision behind Allora’s self-improving decentralized AI network.
In an era of rapid AI advancements, the Allora Network aims to democratize access to machine intelligence and create a novel coordination layer by which different models can contribute to a shared source of collective intelligence. By harnessing collective intelligence within a decentralized network, Allora enables the creation of significantly more advanced AI.
Key innovations include collective intelligence, which enables inferences from different models to be combined to create more performant synthesized inferences, and a differentiated incentive structure that rewards participants based on their specific contributions, ensuring high-quality data and evaluations.
Breaking Down Barriers in AI
Recent advances in data access and computing power have enabled the accelerated improvement of machine intelligence – offering a glimpse into the impact AI will have on our world. However, the tremendous resources required to create state-of-the-art machine intelligence have caused these solutions to be closed and siloed by industry monoliths. To achieve the full potential of machine intelligence, the data, algorithms, and participants must be maximally connected. Network solutions are needed, and the decentralized nature of blockchain technology is ideal for solving this problem.
The Allora Network seeks to dismantle these barriers by fostering a decentralized ecosystem where participants are able to contribute to a shared source of collective intelligence. This approach promotes a more open and collaborative environment where anyone with valuable AI models can contribute to and benefit from the network.
The Allora Network is a protocol that uses decentralized AI and ML to build, extract, and stitch together AI predictions or inferences among its participants. It offers a formalized way to obtain the output of ML models in blockchain networks and to reward the operators of AI nodes who create these inferences. In this way, Allora bridges the information gap between data owners, data processors, AI models, and the end users or consumers who have the means to execute on these insights.
Roles and Interactions within the Network
At the core of the Allora Network is its novel “Inference Synthesis” mechanism. This mechanism enables the combination of multiple instances of AI into a more performant source of collective machine intelligence. This mechanism places a specific emphasis on the importance of context-awareness in assessing the relative contribution of different models in the network to create synthesized inferences that are consistently better than any of the inferences produced by individual models in the network.
Allora is comprised of three types of actors:
- Workers: Provide AI-powered inferences and forecasted losses, contributing to the network's context-awareness.
- Reputers: Evaluate the quality of inferences against the ground truth, ensuring economic security and consensus within the network.
- Consumers: Request inferences and pay for the services using tokens, facilitating the economic flow within the network.
These roles interact in a synergistic manner to maintain the integrity and efficiency of the network.
Allocating Rewards Among Network Tasks
The Allora Network uses a sophisticated system to fairly distribute rewards among various network tasks, promoting collaboration and enhancing overall performance.
Three Main Classes of Tasks
Rewards are allocated among three primary classes of tasks: inference tasks, forecasting tasks, and reputer tasks.
- Inference Tasks
- Role: Inference workers provide AI-powered inferences using their data and algorithms with the aim of optimizing a given objective function in the network.
- Reward Mechanism: Rewards are based on the relative accuracy and relevance of inferences, ensuring high-quality contributions.
- Forecasting Tasks
- Role: Forecasting workers predict the performance of other workers’ inferences, learning over time how different inference workers perform in various contexts.
- Reward Mechanism: Rewards are based on the accuracy of forecasts, improving the network’s context-aware intelligence.
- Reputer Tasks
- Role: Reputers evaluate the quality of inferences against the ground truth.
- Reward Mechanism: Rewards are based on stake and consensus of evaluations, promoting honest and accurate assessments.
Demonstration of the incentive structure of the Allora network, showing how rewards are distributed among different network participants over time. The left-hand column shows the total rewards given to each of the network task classes, i.e. the inference task (blue), the forecasting task (cyan), and the reputer task (red), as well as the combined total in black.
Entropy-Based Reward Allocation
Total rewards for a topic are divided among tasks using an entropy-based method that considers the decentralization and distribution of rewards within each class. Tasks with more contributors or equal distribution receive higher rewards, encouraging inclusivity and wide participation.
Adjusting for Task Utility
Reward allocation between inference and forecasting tasks is adjusted based on the utility of forecasting, measured by its impact on overall network accuracy. Tasks providing greater benefit receive more rewards, ensuring resources are directed where they are most effective.
Sustainable Economics
The Allora Network’s mechanisms, such as the emission rate, reward distribution, and fee pricing model are designed to ensure long-term sustainability and incentivize ongoing participation and improvement of the network.
Token Emission Rate
The ALLO token is the main means of coordination in the network. It is minted to facilitate value exchange among network participants. The emission rate follows a smoothened, disinflationary schedule, designed to maintain long-term rewards within a limited-supply economy. This approach ensures that the annual percentage yield (APY) earned per staked token remains stable, even around major token unlocks, preventing sudden supply shocks.
Reward Distribution
The distribution of rewards is carefully structured to balance incentives across the network. For workers, rewards are proportional to their unique contributions to network accuracy, while reputers receive rewards based on their stake and the consensus of their evaluations. This differentiated incentive structure encourages high-quality contributions and maintains economic security within the network.
Illustration of a modeled APY (given a hypothetical set of parameters) to illustrate the structure of token emissions in the network.
Fee Pricing Model
Allora employs a pay-what-you-want (PWYW) model for consumer fees, allowing users to set their own prices for the inferences they request. This model fosters a competitive environment among topics, as higher fee payments increase a topic's weight and its share of the total token emission. This dynamic ensures that topics providing valuable services are appropriately compensated, promoting continuous improvement and innovation.
Long Term Sustainability
Fees collected from network activities are added to the network treasury, which is used to pay out rewards before minting new tokens.
The described mechanism helps slow the drain of the network treasury while attempting to maintain a reasonable APY for participants: by balancing token emissions with fee revenue, Allora ensures a sustainable and resilient economic model that can adapt to market dynamics and support the network's growth over time.
Future Research
Built with flexibility in mind, the Allora Network is ready for future expansions into various AI domains such as unsupervised learning and generative AI. The whitepaper outlines potential research directions and applications that leverage Allora's unique capabilities, paving the way for innovative solutions across diverse sectors.
Contribute to Allora
The release of the Allora Network whitepaper marks a significant milestone in our journey towards a more democratized and efficient AI ecosystem. By harnessing the collective intelligence of a decentralized network, Allora is poised to transform the landscape of machine intelligence.
Read the full whitepaper here.
Read the docs here if you would like to contribute to the Allora Network and help craft a decentralized source of collective intelligence.
About Allora
Allora is a self-improving decentralized AI network.
Allora enables applications to leverage smarter, more secure AI through a self-improving network of ML models. By combining innovations in crowdsourced intelligence, federated learning, and zkML, Allora unlocks a vast new design space of applications at the intersection of crypto and AI.
To learn more about Allora, visit the website, X, Medium, Discord, and developer docs.
