1,068 research outputs found
The descriptive complexity approach to LOGCFL
Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based first-order
characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation.
Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity
and nesting of groupoidal quantifiers. Our work extends the elaborate theory
relating monoidal quantifiers to NC1 and its subclasses. In the absence of the
BIT predicate, we resolve the main issues: we show in particular that no single
outermost unary groupoidal quantifier with FO can capture all the context-free
languages, and we obtain the surprising result that a variant of Greibach's
``hardest context-free language'' is LOGCFL-complete under quantifier-free
BIT-free projections. We then prove that FO with unary groupoidal quantifiers
is strictly more expressive with the BIT predicate than without. Considering a
particular groupoidal quantifier, we prove that first-order logic with majority
of pairs is strictly more expressive than first-order with majority of
individuals. As a technical tool of independent interest, we define the notion
of an aperiodic nondeterministic finite automaton and prove that FO
translations are precisely the mappings computed by single-valued aperiodic
nondeterministic finite transducers.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur
Comparator automata in quantitative verification
The notion of comparison between system runs is fundamental in formal
verification. This concept is implicitly present in the verification of
qualitative systems, and is more pronounced in the verification of quantitative
systems. In this work, we identify a novel mode of comparison in quantitative
systems: the online comparison of the aggregate values of two sequences of
quantitative weights. This notion is embodied by {\em comparator automata}
({\em comparators}, in short), a new class of automata that read two infinite
sequences of weights synchronously and relate their aggregate values.
We show that {aggregate functions} that can be represented with B\"uchi
automaton result in comparators that are finite-state and accept by the B\"uchi
condition as well. Such {\em -regular comparators} further lead to
generic algorithms for a number of well-studied problems, including the
quantitative inclusion and winning strategies in quantitative graph games with
incomplete information, as well as related non-decision problems, such as
obtaining a finite representation of all counterexamples in the quantitative
inclusion problem.
We study comparators for two aggregate functions: discounted-sum and
limit-average. We prove that the discounted-sum comparator is -regular
iff the discount-factor is an integer. Not every aggregate function, however,
has an -regular comparator. Specifically, we show that the language of
sequence-pairs for which limit-average aggregates exist is neither
-regular nor -context-free. Given this result, we introduce the
notion of {\em prefix-average} as a relaxation of limit-average aggregation,
and show that it admits -context-free comparators
Good-for-games -Pushdown Automata
We introduce good-for-games -pushdown automata (-GFG-PDA).
These are automata whose nondeterminism can be resolved based on the input
processed so far. Good-for-gameness enables automata to be composed with games,
trees, and other automata, applications which otherwise require deterministic
automata. Our main results are that -GFG-PDA are more expressive than
deterministic - pushdown automata and that solving infinite games with
winning conditions specified by -GFG-PDA is EXPTIME-complete. Thus, we
have identified a new class of -contextfree winning conditions for
which solving games is decidable. It follows that the universality problem for
-GFG-PDA is in EXPTIME as well. Moreover, we study closure properties
of the class of languages recognized by -GFG- PDA and decidability of
good-for-gameness of -pushdown automata and languages. Finally, we
compare -GFG-PDA to -visibly PDA, study the resources necessary
to resolve the nondeterminism in -GFG-PDA, and prove that the parity
index hierarchy for -GFG-PDA is infinite.Comment: Extended version of LICS'20 paper of the same name (DOI
10.1145/3373718.3394737); accepted for publication to LMC
On the equivalence, containment, and covering problems for the regular and context-free languages
We consider the complexity of the equivalence and containment problems for regular expressions and context-free grammars, concentrating on the relationship between complexity and various language properties. Finiteness and boundedness of languages are shown to play important roles in the complexity of these problems. An encoding into grammars of Turing machine computations exponential in the size of the grammar is used to prove several exponential lower bounds. These lower bounds include exponential time for testing equivalence of grammars generating finite sets, and exponential space for testing equivalence of non-self-embedding grammars. Several problems which might be complex because of this encoding are shown to simplify for linear grammars. Other problems considered include grammatical covering and structural equivalence for right-linear, linear, and arbitrary grammars
Immunity and Pseudorandomness of Context-Free Languages
We discuss the computational complexity of context-free languages,
concentrating on two well-known structural properties---immunity and
pseudorandomness. An infinite language is REG-immune (resp., CFL-immune) if it
contains no infinite subset that is a regular (resp., context-free) language.
We prove that (i) there is a context-free REG-immune language outside REG/n and
(ii) there is a REG-bi-immune language that can be computed deterministically
using logarithmic space. We also show that (iii) there is a CFL-simple set,
where a CFL-simple language is an infinite context-free language whose
complement is CFL-immune. Similar to the REG-immunity, a REG-primeimmune
language has no polynomially dense subsets that are also regular. We further
prove that (iv) there is a context-free language that is REG/n-bi-primeimmune.
Concerning pseudorandomness of context-free languages, we show that (v) CFL
contains REG/n-pseudorandom languages. Finally, we prove that (vi) against
REG/n, there exists an almost 1-1 pseudorandom generator computable in
nondeterministic pushdown automata equipped with a write-only output tape and
(vii) against REG, there is no almost 1-1 weakly pseudorandom generator
computable deterministically in linear time by a single-tape Turing machine.Comment: A4, 23 pages, 10 pt. A complete revision of the initial version that
was posted in February 200
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