64 research outputs found
Regular Cost Functions, Part I: Logic and Algebra over Words
The theory of regular cost functions is a quantitative extension to the
classical notion of regularity. A cost function associates to each input a
non-negative integer value (or infinity), as opposed to languages which only
associate to each input the two values "inside" and "outside". This theory is a
continuation of the works on distance automata and similar models. These models
of automata have been successfully used for solving the star-height problem,
the finite power property, the finite substitution problem, the relative
inclusion star-height problem and the boundedness problem for monadic-second
order logic over words. Our notion of regularity can be -- as in the classical
theory of regular languages -- equivalently defined in terms of automata,
expressions, algebraic recognisability, and by a variant of the monadic
second-order logic. These equivalences are strict extensions of the
corresponding classical results. The present paper introduces the cost monadic
logic, the quantitative extension to the notion of monadic second-order logic
we use, and show that some problems of existence of bounds are decidable for
this logic. This is achieved by introducing the corresponding algebraic
formalism: stabilisation monoids.Comment: 47 page
On the Complexity of the Relative Inclusion Star Height Problem
Given a family of recognizable languages L1, . . . ,Lm and recognizable languages K1 ⊆ K2, the relative inclusion star height problem means to compute the minimal star height of some rational expression r over L1, . . . ,Lm satisfying K1 ⊆ L(r) ⊆ K2. We show that this problem is of elementary complexity and give a detailed analysis its complexity depending on the representation of K1 and K2 and whether L1, . . . ,Lm are singletons
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Approximate comparison of distance automata
Distance automata are automata weighted over the semiring (N∪ {∞}, min,+) (the tropical semiring). Such automata compute functions from words to N
∪{∞} such as the number of occurrences of a given letter. It is known that testing f 0 and two functions f,g computed by distance automata, answers "yes" if f <= (1-ε ) g, "no" if f \not\leq g, and may answer "yes" or "no" in all other cases. This result highly refines previously known decidability results of the same type. The core argument behind this quasi-decision procedure is an algorithm which is able to provide an approximated finite presentation to the closure under products of sets of matrices over the tropical semiring. We also provide another theorem, of affine domination, which shows that previously known decision procedures for cost-automata have an improved precision when used over distance automata
On the Structure and Complexity of Rational Sets of Regular Languages
In a recent thread of papers, we have introduced FQL, a precise specification
language for test coverage, and developed the test case generation engine
FShell for ANSI C. In essence, an FQL test specification amounts to a set of
regular languages, each of which has to be matched by at least one test
execution. To describe such sets of regular languages, the FQL semantics uses
an automata-theoretic concept known as rational sets of regular languages
(RSRLs). RSRLs are automata whose alphabet consists of regular expressions.
Thus, the language accepted by the automaton is a set of regular expressions.
In this paper, we study RSRLs from a theoretic point of view. More
specifically, we analyze RSRL closure properties under common set theoretic
operations, and the complexity of membership checking, i.e., whether a regular
language is an element of a RSRL. For all questions we investigate both the
general case and the case of finite sets of regular languages. Although a few
properties are left as open problems, the paper provides a systematic semantic
foundation for the test specification language FQL
Sampled Semantics of Timed Automata
Sampled semantics of timed automata is a finite approximation of their dense
time behavior. While the former is closer to the actual software or hardware
systems with a fixed granularity of time, the abstract character of the latter
makes it appealing for system modeling and verification. We study one aspect of
the relation between these two semantics, namely checking whether the system
exhibits some qualitative (untimed) behaviors in the dense time which cannot be
reproduced by any implementation with a fixed sampling rate. More formally, the
\emph{sampling problem} is to decide whether there is a sampling rate such that
all qualitative behaviors (the untimed language) accepted by a given timed
automaton in dense time semantics can be also accepted in sampled semantics. We
show that this problem is decidable
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Containment and equivalence of weighted automata: Probabilistic and max-plus cases
This paper surveys some results regarding decision problems for probabilistic and max-plus automata, such as containment and equivalence. Probabilistic and max-plus automata are part of the general family of weighted automata, whose semantics are maps from words to real values. Given two weighted automata, the equivalence problem asks whether their semantics are the same, and the containment problem whether one is point-wise smaller than the other one. These problems have been studied intensively and this paper will review some techniques used to show (un)decidability and state a list of open questions that still remain
Decidability Results for the Boundedness Problem
We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least
fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae
over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is
decidable whether the fixed-point recursion based on phi is spurious over the
class of all trees in the sense that there is some uniform finite bound for the
number of iterations phi takes to reach its least fixed point, uniformly across
all trees. We also identify the exact complexity of this problem. The proof
uses automata-theoretic techniques. This key result extends, by means of
model-theoretic interpretations, to show decidability of the boundedness
problem for MSO and guarded second-order logic (GSO) over the classes of
structures of fixed finite tree-width. Further model-theoretic transfer
arguments allow us to derive major known decidability results for boundedness
for fragments of first-order logic as well as new ones
Safety and Liveness of Quantitative Automata
The safety-liveness dichotomy is a fundamental concept in formal languages which plays a key role in verification. Recently, this dichotomy has been lifted to quantitative properties, which are arbitrary functions from infinite words to partially-ordered domains. We look into harnessing the dichotomy for the specific classes of quantitative properties expressed by quantitative automata. These automata contain finitely many states and rational-valued transition weights, and their common value functions Inf, Sup, LimInf, LimSup, LimInfAvg, LimSupAvg, and DSum map infinite words into the totally-ordered domain of real numbers. In this automata-theoretic setting, we establish a connection between quantitative safety and topological continuity and provide an alternative characterization of quantitative safety and liveness in terms of their boolean counterparts. For all common value functions, we show how the safety closure of a quantitative automaton can be constructed in PTime, and we provide PSpace-complete checks of whether a given quantitative automaton is safe or live, with the exception of LimInfAvg and LimSupAvg automata, for which the safety check is in ExpSpace. Moreover, for deterministic Sup, LimInf, and LimSup automata, we give PTime decompositions into safe and live automata. These decompositions enable the separation of techniques for safety and liveness verification for quantitative specifications
Size-Change Abstraction and Max-Plus Automata
Max-plus automata (over ℕ ∪ − ∞) are finite devices that map input words to non-negative integers or − ∞. In this paper we present (a) an algorithm allowing to compute the asymptotic behaviour of max-plus automata, and (b) an application of this technique to the evaluation of the computational time complexity of programs
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