Complexity of short Presburger arithmetic

We study complexity of short sentences in Presburger arithmetic (Short-PA). Here by "short" we mean sentences with a bounded number of variables, quantifiers, inequalities and Boolean operations; the input consists only of the integers involved in the inequalities. We prove that assuming Kannan's partition can be found in polynomial time, the satisfiability of Short-PA sentences can be decided in polynomial time. Furthermore, under the same assumption, we show that the numbers of satisfying assignments of short Presburger sentences can also be computed in polynomial time

Presburger arithmetic, rational generating functions, and quasi-polynomials

Presburger arithmetic is the first-order theory of the natural numbers with addition (but no multiplication). We characterize sets that can be defined by a Presburger formula as exactly the sets whose characteristic functions can be represented by rational generating functions; a geometric characterization of such sets is also given. In addition, if p=(p_1,...,p_n) are a subset of the free variables in a Presburger formula, we can define a counting function g(p) to be the number of solutions to the formula, for a given p. We show that every counting function obtained in this way may be represented as, equivalently, either a piecewise quasi-polynomial or a rational generating function. Finally, we translate known computational complexity results into this setting and discuss open directions.Comment: revised, including significant additions explaining computational complexity results. To appear in Journal of Symbolic Logic. Extended abstract in ICALP 2013. 17 page

VC-dimension of short Presburger formulas

We study VC-dimension of short formulas in Presburger Arithmetic, defined to have a bounded number of variables, quantifiers and atoms. We give both lower and upper bounds, which are tight up to a polynomial factor in the bit length of the formula

Subclasses of Presburger Arithmetic and the Weak EXP Hierarchy

It is shown that for any fixed $i>0$, the $\Sigma_{i+1}$-fragment of Presburger arithmetic, i.e., its restriction to $i+1$ quantifier alternations beginning with an existential quantifier, is complete for $\mathsf{\Sigma}^{\mathsf{EXP}}_{i}$, the $i$-th level of the weak EXP hierarchy, an analogue to the polynomial-time hierarchy residing between $\mathsf{NEXP}$ and $\mathsf{EXPSPACE}$. This result completes the computational complexity landscape for Presburger arithmetic, a line of research which dates back to the seminal work by Fischer & Rabin in 1974. Moreover, we apply some of the techniques developed in the proof of the lower bound in order to establish bounds on sets of naturals definable in the $\Sigma_1$-fragment of Presburger arithmetic: given a $\Sigma_1$-formula $\Phi(x)$, it is shown that the set of non-negative solutions is an ultimately periodic set whose period is at most doubly-exponential and that this bound is tight.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Bounds on the Automata Size for Presburger Arithmetic

Automata provide a decision procedure for Presburger arithmetic. However, until now only crude lower and upper bounds were known on the sizes of the automata produced by this approach. In this paper, we prove an upper bound on the the number of states of the minimal deterministic automaton for a Presburger arithmetic formula. This bound depends on the length of the formula and the quantifiers occurring in the formula. The upper bound is established by comparing the automata for Presburger arithmetic formulas with the formulas produced by a quantifier elimination method. We also show that our bound is tight, even for nondeterministic automata. Moreover, we provide optimal automata constructions for linear equations and inequations

The First-Order Theory of Sets with Cardinality Constraints is Decidable

We show that the decidability of the first-order theory of the language that combines Boolean algebras of sets of uninterpreted elements with Presburger arithmetic operations. We thereby disprove a recent conjecture that this theory is undecidable. Our language allows relating the cardinalities of sets to the values of integer variables, and can distinguish finite and infinite sets. We use quantifier elimination to show the decidability and obtain an elementary upper bound on the complexity. Precise program analyses can use our decidability result to verify representation invariants of data structures that use an integer field to represent the number of stored elements.Comment: 18 page

Unary Pushdown Automata and Straight-Line Programs

We consider decision problems for deterministic pushdown automata over a unary alphabet (udpda, for short). Udpda are a simple computation model that accept exactly the unary regular languages, but can be exponentially more succinct than finite-state automata. We complete the complexity landscape for udpda by showing that emptiness (and thus universality) is P-hard, equivalence and compressed membership problems are P-complete, and inclusion is coNP-complete. Our upper bounds are based on a translation theorem between udpda and straight-line programs over the binary alphabet (SLPs). We show that the characteristic sequence of any udpda can be represented as a pair of SLPs---one for the prefix, one for the lasso---that have size linear in the size of the udpda and can be computed in polynomial time. Hence, decision problems on udpda are reduced to decision problems on SLPs. Conversely, any SLP can be converted in logarithmic space into a udpda, and this forms the basis for our lower bound proofs. We show coNP-hardness of the ordered matching problem for SLPs, from which we derive coNP-hardness for inclusion. In addition, we complete the complexity landscape for unary nondeterministic pushdown automata by showing that the universality problem is $\Pi_2 \mathrm P$-hard, using a new class of integer expressions. Our techniques have applications beyond udpda. We show that our results imply $\Pi_2 \mathrm P$-completeness for a natural fragment of Presburger arithmetic and coNP lower bounds for compressed matching problems with one-character wildcards