Blackwell-Optimal Strategies in Priority Mean-Payoff Games

We examine perfect information stochastic mean-payoff games - a class of games containing as special sub-classes the usual mean-payoff games and parity games. We show that deterministic memoryless strategies that are optimal for discounted games with state-dependent discount factors close to 1 are optimal for priority mean-payoff games establishing a strong link between these two classes

The growth rate over trees of any family of set defined by a monadic second order formula is semi-computable

Monadic second order logic can be used to express many classical notions of sets of vertices of a graph as for instance: dominating sets, induced matchings, perfect codes, independent sets or irredundant sets. Bounds on the number of sets of any such family of sets are interesting from a combinatorial point of view and have algorithmic applications. Many such bounds on different families of sets over different classes of graphs are already provided in the literature. In particular, Rote recently showed that the number of minimal dominating sets in trees of order $n$ is at most $95^{\frac{n}{13}}$ and that this bound is asymptotically sharp up to a multiplicative constant. We build on his work to show that what he did for minimal dominating sets can be done for any family of sets definable by a monadic second order formula. We first show that, for any monadic second order formula over graphs that characterizes a given kind of subset of its vertices, the maximal number of such sets in a tree can be expressed as the \textit{growth rate of a bilinear system}. This mostly relies on well known links between monadic second order logic over trees and tree automata and basic tree automata manipulations. Then we show that this "growth rate" of a bilinear system can be approximated from above.We then use our implementation of this result to provide bounds on the number of independent dominating sets, total perfect dominating sets, induced matchings, maximal induced matchings, minimal perfect dominating sets, perfect codes and maximal irredundant sets on trees. We also solve a question from D. Y. Kang et al. regarding $r$-matchings and improve a bound from G\'orska and Skupie\'n on the number of maximal matchings on trees. Remark that this approach is easily generalizable to graphs of bounded tree width or clique width (or any similar class of graphs where tree automata are meaningful)

FO-definable transformations of infinite strings

The theory of regular and aperiodic transformations of finite strings has recently received a lot of interest. These classes can be equivalently defined using logic (Monadic second-order logic and first-order logic), two-way machines (regular two-way and aperiodic two-way transducers), and one-way register machines (regular streaming string and aperiodic streaming string transducers). These classes are known to be closed under operations such as sequential composition and regular (star-free) choice; and problems such as functional equivalence and type checking, are decidable for these classes. On the other hand, for infinite strings these results are only known for $\omega$-regular transformations: Alur, Filiot, and Trivedi studied transformations of infinite strings and introduced an extension of streaming string transducers over $\omega$-strings and showed that they capture monadic second-order definable transformations for infinite strings. In this paper we extend their work to recover connection for infinite strings among first-order logic definable transformations, aperiodic two-way transducers, and aperiodic streaming string transducers