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Zahra Batool

zahra.batool@mila.quebec
Postdoctorate - École de technologie suprérieure
Supervisor
Ulrich Aivodji
Research Topics
Blockchain
Deep Learning
Federated Learning
Quantum Information Theory
GitHub

Publications

DeFiRank: Federated Pairwise Ranking for Governance in Decentralized Financial Networks
Zahra Batool
Michael Duchesne
Kaiwen Zhang
Ulrich Aivodji
Existing governance approaches in decentralized financial networks rely on manual review processes conducted by human committees, which intr… (see more)oduces subjective bias, creates a scalability bottleneck under high network volume, and fails to capture complex behavioural patterns and evolving network dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose \name, a federated learning-based pairwise ranking framework in which multiple institutions collaboratively train a ranking model without sharing their private transaction data. This collaborative learning enables the model to capture network-wide behavioural patterns that signify strong network participation and directly contribute to the network effect, including diversity of counterparties, usage of multiple applications, and frequency of transactions. The proposed system ranks providers based on the authenticity of their actions, promoting genuine contributors and demoting those exhibiting suspicious behaviour. We evaluate \name\ on a real-world blockchain transaction dataset. Results demonstrate that the federated approach achieves ranking performance modestly below the centralized baseline (NDCG@15:
2026-10-08
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org