Operations on Automata with All States Final

We study the complexity of basic regular operations on languages represented by incomplete deterministic or nondeterministic automata, in which all states are final. Such languages are known to be prefix-closed. We get tight bounds on both incomplete and nondeterministic state complexity of complement, intersection, union, concatenation, star, and reversal on prefix-closed languages.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527

Verifying proofs in constant depth

In this paper we initiate the study of proof systems where verification of proofs proceeds by NC circuits. We investigate the question which languages admit proof systems in this very restricted model. Formulated alternatively, we ask which languages can be enumerated by NC functions. Our results show that the answer to this problem is not determined by the complexity of the language. On the one hand, we construct NC proof systems for a variety of languages ranging from regular to NP-complete. On the other hand, we show by combinatorial methods that even easy regular languages such as Exact-OR do not admit NC proof systems. We also present a general construction of proof systems for regular languages with strongly connected NFA's

Symbolic Algorithms for Language Equivalence and Kleene Algebra with Tests

We first propose algorithms for checking language equivalence of finite automata over a large alphabet. We use symbolic automata, where the transition function is compactly represented using a (multi-terminal) binary decision diagrams (BDD). The key idea consists in computing a bisimulation by exploring reachable pairs symbolically, so as to avoid redundancies. This idea can be combined with already existing optimisations, and we show in particular a nice integration with the disjoint sets forest data-structure from Hopcroft and Karp's standard algorithm. Then we consider Kleene algebra with tests (KAT), an algebraic theory that can be used for verification in various domains ranging from compiler optimisation to network programming analysis. This theory is decidable by reduction to language equivalence of automata on guarded strings, a particular kind of automata that have exponentially large alphabets. We propose several methods allowing to construct symbolic automata out of KAT expressions, based either on Brzozowski's derivatives or standard automata constructions. All in all, this results in efficient algorithms for deciding equivalence of KAT expressions

Automata and rational expressions

This text is an extended version of the chapter 'Automata and rational expressions' in the AutoMathA Handbook that will appear soon, published by the European Science Foundation and edited by JeanEricPin

State Complexity of Regular Tree Languages for Tree Matching

We study the state complexity of regular tree languages for tree matching problem. Given a tree t and a set of pattern trees L, we can decide whether or not there exists a subtree occurrence of trees in L from the tree t by considering the new language L′ which accepts all trees containing trees in L as subtrees. We consider the case when we are given a set of pattern trees as a regular tree language and investigate the state complexity. Based on the sequential and parallel tree concatenation, we define three types of tree languages for deciding the existence of different types of subtree occurrences. We also study the deterministic top-down state complexity of path-closed languages for the same problem.</jats:p

An introduction to finite automata and their connection to logic

This is a tutorial on finite automata. We present the standard material on determinization and minimization, as well as an account of the equivalence of finite automata and monadic second-order logic. We conclude with an introduction to the syntactic monoid, and as an application give a proof of the equivalence of first-order definability and aperiodicity