# Snowveil: A Framework for Decentralised Preference Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18444/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Preference Restrictions in Computational Social Choice: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09092/) (2022)
- [Incentivising Participation in Liquid Democracy with Breadth-First Delegation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03710/) (2018)
- [Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT Consensus through Metastability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08936/) (2019)
- [Liquid Democracy with Ranked Delegations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07509/) (2021)
- [AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of the Collective Will](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05830/) (2025)
- [Aggregating partial rankings with applications to peer grading in massive online open courses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4619/) (2014)
- [How effective can simple ordinal peer grading be?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07985/) (2016)
- [Tracking Truth by Weighting Proxies in Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09081/) (2021)
- [Unravelling multi-agent ranked delegations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13145/) (2021)
- [An Analysis of Avalanche Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02811/) (2024)
- [Learning Optimal Stable Matches in Decentralized Markets with Unknown Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04669/) (2024)
- [Most Expected Winner: An Interpretation of Winners over Uncertain Voter Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00082/) (2021)
- [Anonymous and Copy-Robust Delegations for Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01174/) (2023)
- [Frosty: Bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14250/) (2024)
- [Asynchronous Gossip Algorithms for Rank-Based Statistical Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07543/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aggregating subjective preferences in social choice traditionally assumes a trusted central authority. In contrast, this paper formalises Decentralised Preference Discovery (DPD): the reliable identification of a social choice parameter (e.g. the canonical outcome of an aggregation rule applied to the global preference profile) under conditions of partial information, asynchronous interaction, censorship resistance, and no central coordinator. To address DPD, we propose Snowveil, a gossip-based framework where agents repeatedly sample random peer rankings and update local beliefs to converge on the canonical outcome. Using a potential function, submartingale theory, and concentration bounds, we prove the system reaches this stable state with tunable high probability, in finite expected time. This single-winner process can then be iterated to construct a set of winning candidates for multi-winner scenarios. Snowveil is agnostic to specific aggregation rules, requiring only that the rule satisfies axioms such as Positive Responsiveness, thus offering a formal basis for a wider class of DPD protocols. Demonstrating Snowveil's modularity, we introduce the Constrained Hybrid Borda (CHB), an aggregation rule designed to balance broad consensus with plurality support. We provide an axiomatic analysis of CHB and present empirical results via extensive simulation, validating Snowveil's O(n) scalability. Overall, this work provides a foundation for how a stable consensus emerges from subjective, expressive, and diverse preference profiles in large-scale decentralised systems.