887 research outputs found
Querying the Guarded Fragment
Evaluating a Boolean conjunctive query Q against a guarded first-order theory
F is equivalent to checking whether "F and not Q" is unsatisfiable. This
problem is relevant to the areas of database theory and description logic.
Since Q may not be guarded, well known results about the decidability,
complexity, and finite-model property of the guarded fragment do not obviously
carry over to conjunctive query answering over guarded theories, and had been
left open in general. By investigating finite guarded bisimilar covers of
hypergraphs and relational structures, and by substantially generalising
Rosati's finite chase, we prove for guarded theories F and (unions of)
conjunctive queries Q that (i) Q is true in each model of F iff Q is true in
each finite model of F and (ii) determining whether F implies Q is
2EXPTIME-complete. We further show the following results: (iii) the existence
of polynomial-size conformal covers of arbitrary hypergraphs; (iv) a new proof
of the finite model property of the clique-guarded fragment; (v) the small
model property of the guarded fragment with optimal bounds; (vi) a
polynomial-time solution to the canonisation problem modulo guarded
bisimulation, which yields (vii) a capturing result for guarded bisimulation
invariant PTIME.Comment: This is an improved and extended version of the paper of the same
title presented at LICS 201
On Symmetric Circuits and Fixed-Point Logics
We study properties of relational structures such as graphs that are decided
by families of Boolean circuits. Circuits that decide such properties are
necessarily invariant to permutations of the elements of the input structures.
We focus on families of circuits that are symmetric, i.e., circuits whose
invariance is witnessed by automorphisms of the circuit induced by the
permutation of the input structure. We show that the expressive power of such
families is closely tied to definability in logic. In particular, we show that
the queries defined on structures by uniform families of symmetric Boolean
circuits with majority gates are exactly those definable in fixed-point logic
with counting. This shows that inexpressibility results in the latter logic
lead to lower bounds against polynomial-size families of symmetric circuits.Comment: 22 pages. Full version of a paper to appear in STACS 201
Subspace-Invariant AC Formulas
We consider the action of a linear subspace of on the set of
AC formulas with inputs labeled by literals in the set , where an element acts on formulas by
transposing the th pair of literals for all such that . A
formula is {\em -invariant} if it is fixed by this action. For example,
there is a well-known recursive construction of depth formulas of size
computing the -variable PARITY function; these
formulas are easily seen to be -invariant where is the subspace of
even-weight elements of . In this paper we establish a nearly
matching lower bound on the -invariant depth
formula size of PARITY. Quantitatively this improves the best known
lower bound for {\em unrestricted} depth
formulas, while avoiding the use of the switching lemma. More generally,
for any linear subspaces , we show that if a Boolean function is
-invariant and non-constant over , then its -invariant depth
formula size is at least where is the minimum Hamming
weight of a vector in
Randomisation and Derandomisation in Descriptive Complexity Theory
We study probabilistic complexity classes and questions of derandomisation
from a logical point of view. For each logic L we introduce a new logic BPL,
bounded error probabilistic L, which is defined from L in a similar way as the
complexity class BPP, bounded error probabilistic polynomial time, is defined
from PTIME. Our main focus lies on questions of derandomisation, and we prove
that there is a query which is definable in BPFO, the probabilistic version of
first-order logic, but not in Cinf, finite variable infinitary logic with
counting. This implies that many of the standard logics of finite model theory,
like transitive closure logic and fixed-point logic, both with and without
counting, cannot be derandomised. Similarly, we present a query on ordered
structures which is definable in BPFO but not in monadic second-order logic,
and a query on additive structures which is definable in BPFO but not in FO.
The latter of these queries shows that certain uniform variants of AC0
(bounded-depth polynomial sized circuits) cannot be derandomised. These results
are in contrast to the general belief that most standard complexity classes can
be derandomised. Finally, we note that BPIFP+C, the probabilistic version of
fixed-point logic with counting, captures the complexity class BPP, even on
unordered structures
Logics for Unranked Trees: An Overview
Labeled unranked trees are used as a model of XML documents, and logical
languages for them have been studied actively over the past several years. Such
logics have different purposes: some are better suited for extracting data,
some for expressing navigational properties, and some make it easy to relate
complex properties of trees to the existence of tree automata for those
properties. Furthermore, logics differ significantly in their model-checking
properties, their automata models, and their behavior on ordered and unordered
trees. In this paper we present a survey of logics for unranked trees
Model Checking Lower Bounds for Simple Graphs
A well-known result by Frick and Grohe shows that deciding FO logic on trees
involves a parameter dependence that is a tower of exponentials. Though this
lower bound is tight for Courcelle's theorem, it has been evaded by a series of
recent meta-theorems for other graph classes. Here we provide some additional
non-elementary lower bound results, which are in some senses stronger. Our goal
is to explain common traits in these recent meta-theorems and identify barriers
to further progress. More specifically, first, we show that on the class of
threshold graphs, and therefore also on any union and complement-closed class,
there is no model-checking algorithm with elementary parameter dependence even
for FO logic. Second, we show that there is no model-checking algorithm with
elementary parameter dependence for MSO logic even restricted to paths (or
equivalently to unary strings), unless E=NE. As a corollary, we resolve an open
problem on the complexity of MSO model-checking on graphs of bounded max-leaf
number. Finally, we look at MSO on the class of colored trees of depth d. We
show that, assuming the ETH, for every fixed d>=1 at least d+1 levels of
exponentiation are necessary for this problem, thus showing that the (d+1)-fold
exponential algorithm recently given by Gajarsk\`{y} and Hlin\u{e}n\`{y} is
essentially optimal
Advanced Probabilistic Couplings for Differential Privacy
Differential privacy is a promising formal approach to data privacy, which
provides a quantitative bound on the privacy cost of an algorithm that operates
on sensitive information. Several tools have been developed for the formal
verification of differentially private algorithms, including program logics and
type systems. However, these tools do not capture fundamental techniques that
have emerged in recent years, and cannot be used for reasoning about
cutting-edge differentially private algorithms. Existing techniques fail to
handle three broad classes of algorithms: 1) algorithms where privacy depends
accuracy guarantees, 2) algorithms that are analyzed with the advanced
composition theorem, which shows slower growth in the privacy cost, 3)
algorithms that interactively accept adaptive inputs.
We address these limitations with a new formalism extending apRHL, a
relational program logic that has been used for proving differential privacy of
non-interactive algorithms, and incorporating aHL, a (non-relational) program
logic for accuracy properties. We illustrate our approach through a single
running example, which exemplifies the three classes of algorithms and explores
new variants of the Sparse Vector technique, a well-studied algorithm from the
privacy literature. We implement our logic in EasyCrypt, and formally verify
privacy. We also introduce a novel coupling technique called \emph{optimal
subset coupling} that may be of independent interest
Learning Task Specifications from Demonstrations
Real world applications often naturally decompose into several sub-tasks. In
many settings (e.g., robotics) demonstrations provide a natural way to specify
the sub-tasks. However, most methods for learning from demonstrations either do
not provide guarantees that the artifacts learned for the sub-tasks can be
safely recombined or limit the types of composition available. Motivated by
this deficit, we consider the problem of inferring Boolean non-Markovian
rewards (also known as logical trace properties or specifications) from
demonstrations provided by an agent operating in an uncertain, stochastic
environment. Crucially, specifications admit well-defined composition rules
that are typically easy to interpret. In this paper, we formulate the
specification inference task as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) probability
inference problem, apply the principle of maximum entropy to derive an analytic
demonstration likelihood model and give an efficient approach to search for the
most likely specification in a large candidate pool of specifications. In our
experiments, we demonstrate how learning specifications can help avoid common
problems that often arise due to ad-hoc reward composition.Comment: NIPS 201
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