298 research outputs found
Weak index versus Borel rank
We investigate weak recognizability of deterministic languages of infinite
trees. We prove that for deterministic languages the Borel hierarchy and the
weak index hierarchy coincide. Furthermore, we propose a procedure computing
for a deterministic automaton an equivalent minimal index weak automaton with a
quadratic number of states. The algorithm works within the time of solving the
emptiness problem
Boundedness in languages of infinite words
We define a new class of languages of -words, strictly extending
-regular languages.
One way to present this new class is by a type of regular expressions. The
new expressions are an extension of -regular expressions where two new
variants of the Kleene star are added: and . These new
exponents are used to say that parts of the input word have bounded size, and
that parts of the input can have arbitrarily large sizes, respectively. For
instance, the expression represents the language of infinite
words over the letters where there is a common bound on the number of
consecutive letters . The expression represents a similar
language, but this time the distance between consecutive 's is required to
tend toward the infinite.
We develop a theory for these languages, with a focus on decidability and
closure. We define an equivalent automaton model, extending B\"uchi automata.
The main technical result is a complementation lemma that works for languages
where only one type of exponent---either or ---is used.
We use the closure and decidability results to obtain partial decidability
results for the logic MSOLB, a logic obtained by extending monadic second-order
logic with new quantifiers that speak about the size of sets
Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order Logic with Transitive Closure
String languages recognizable in (deterministic) log-space are characterized
either by two-way (deterministic) multi-head automata, or following Immerman,
by first-order logic with (deterministic) transitive closure. Here we elaborate
this result, and match the number of heads to the arity of the transitive
closure. More precisely, first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive
closure has the same power as deterministic automata walking on their input
with k heads, additionally using a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is
valid for strings, ordered trees, and in general for families of graphs having
a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs
in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and
rectangular mazes. For nondeterministic automata, the logic is restricted to
positive occurrences of transitive closure.
The special case of k=1 for trees, shows that single-head deterministic
tree-walking automata with nested pebbles are characterized by first-order
logic with unary deterministic transitive closure. This refines our earlier
result that placed these automata between first-order and monadic second-order
logic on trees.Comment: Paper for Logical Methods in Computer Science, 27 pages, 1 figur
Index problems for game automata
For a given regular language of infinite trees, one can ask about the minimal
number of priorities needed to recognize this language with a
non-deterministic, alternating, or weak alternating parity automaton. These
questions are known as, respectively, the non-deterministic, alternating, and
weak Rabin-Mostowski index problems. Whether they can be answered effectively
is a long-standing open problem, solved so far only for languages recognizable
by deterministic automata (the alternating variant trivializes).
We investigate a wider class of regular languages, recognizable by so-called
game automata, which can be seen as the closure of deterministic ones under
complementation and composition. Game automata are known to recognize languages
arbitrarily high in the alternating Rabin-Mostowski index hierarchy; that is,
the alternating index problem does not trivialize any more.
Our main contribution is that all three index problems are decidable for
languages recognizable by game automata. Additionally, we show that it is
decidable whether a given regular language can be recognized by a game
automaton
The Caucal hierarchy of infinite graphs in terms of logic and higher-order pushdown automata
In this paper we give two equivalent characterizations of the Caucal hierarchy, a hierarchy of infinite graphs with a decidable monadic second-order (MSO) theory. It is obtained by iterating the graph transformations of unfolding and inverse rational mapping. The first characterization sticks to this hierarchical approach, replacing the language-theoretic operation of a rational mapping by an MSO-transduction and the unfolding by the treegraph operation. The second characterization is non-iterative. We show that the family of graphs of the Caucal hierarchy coincides with the family of graphs obtained as the ε-closure of configuration graphs of higher-order pushdown automata. While the different characterizations of the graph family show their robustness and thus also their importance, the characterization in terms of higher-order pushdown automata additionally yields that the graph hierarchy is indeed strict
The Borel hierarchy is infinite in the class of regular sets of trees
AbstractFor all the Borel classes of finite order, we construct weakly acceptable sets of infinite trees representing these classes
Adding modular predicates to first-order fragments
We investigate the decidability of the definability problem for fragments of
first order logic over finite words enriched with modular predicates. Our
approach aims toward the most generic statements that we could achieve, which
successfully covers the quantifier alternation hierarchy of first order logic
and some of its fragments. We obtain that deciding this problem for each level
of the alternation hierarchy of both first order logic and its two-variable
fragment when equipped with all regular numerical predicates is not harder than
deciding it for the corresponding level equipped with only the linear order and
the successor. For two-variable fragments we also treat the case of the
signature containing only the order and modular predicates.Relying on some
recent results, this proves the decidability for each level of the alternation
hierarchy of the two-variable first order fragmentwhile in the case of the
first order logic the question remains open for levels greater than two.The
main ingredients of the proofs are syntactic transformations of first order
formulas as well as the algebraic framework of finite categories
Cost Automata, Safe Schemes, and Downward Closures
Higher-order recursion schemes are an expressive formalism used to define languages of possibly infinite ranked trees. They extend regular and context-free grammars, and are equivalent to simply typed ?Y-calculus and collapsible pushdown automata. In this work we prove, under a syntactical constraint called safety, decidability of the model-checking problem for recursion schemes against properties defined by alternating B-automata, an extension of alternating parity automata for infinite trees with a boundedness acceptance condition. We then exploit this result to show how to compute downward closures of languages of finite trees recognized by safe recursion schemes
Exploiting the Temporal Logic Hierarchy and the Non-Confluence Property for Efficient LTL Synthesis
The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal
logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an
equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the
corresponding omega-regular game. To this end, the obtained omega-automata have
to be (pseudo)-determinized where typically a variant of Safra's
determinization procedure is used. In this paper, we show that this
determinization step can be significantly improved for tool implementations by
replacing Safra's determinization by simpler determinization procedures. In
particular, we exploit (1) the temporal logic hierarchy that corresponds to the
well-known automata hierarchy consisting of safety, liveness, Buechi, and
co-Buechi automata as well as their boolean closures, (2) the non-confluence
property of omega-automata that result from certain translations of LTL
formulas, and (3) symbolic implementations of determinization procedures for
the Rabin-Scott and the Miyano-Hayashi breakpoint construction. In particular,
we present convincing experimental results that demonstrate the practical
applicability of our new synthesis procedure
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