The Infimum Problem as a Generalization of the Inclusion Problem for Automata

This thesis is concerned with automata over infinite trees. They are given a labeled infinite tree and accept or reject this tree based on its labels. A generalization of these automata with binary decisions are weighted automata. They do not just decide 'yes' or 'no', but rather compute an arbitrary value from a given algebraic structure, e.g., a semiring or a lattice. When passing from unweighted to weighted formalisms, many problems can be translated accordingly. The purpose of this work is to determine the feasibility of solving the inclusion problem for automata on infinite trees and its generalization to weighted automata, the infimum aggregation problem

Weak MSO+U with Path Quantifiers over Infinite Trees

This paper shows that over infinite trees, satisfiability is decidable for weak monadic second-order logic extended by the unbounding quantifier U and quantification over infinite paths. The proof is by reduction to emptiness for a certain automaton model, while emptiness for the automaton model is decided using profinite trees.Comment: version of an ICALP 2014 paper with appendice

Comparator automata in quantitative verification

The notion of comparison between system runs is fundamental in formal verification. This concept is implicitly present in the verification of qualitative systems, and is more pronounced in the verification of quantitative systems. In this work, we identify a novel mode of comparison in quantitative systems: the online comparison of the aggregate values of two sequences of quantitative weights. This notion is embodied by {\em comparator automata} ({\em comparators}, in short), a new class of automata that read two infinite sequences of weights synchronously and relate their aggregate values. We show that {aggregate functions} that can be represented with B\"uchi automaton result in comparators that are finite-state and accept by the B\"uchi condition as well. Such {\em $\omega$-regular comparators} further lead to generic algorithms for a number of well-studied problems, including the quantitative inclusion and winning strategies in quantitative graph games with incomplete information, as well as related non-decision problems, such as obtaining a finite representation of all counterexamples in the quantitative inclusion problem. We study comparators for two aggregate functions: discounted-sum and limit-average. We prove that the discounted-sum comparator is $\omega$-regular iff the discount-factor is an integer. Not every aggregate function, however, has an $\omega$-regular comparator. Specifically, we show that the language of sequence-pairs for which limit-average aggregates exist is neither $\omega$-regular nor $\omega$-context-free. Given this result, we introduce the notion of {\em prefix-average} as a relaxation of limit-average aggregation, and show that it admits $\omega$-context-free comparators

Edit Distance for Pushdown Automata

The edit distance between two words $w_1, w_2$ is the minimal number of word operations (letter insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to transform $w_1$ to $w_2$. The edit distance generalizes to languages $\mathcal{L}_1, \mathcal{L}_2$, where the edit distance from $\mathcal{L}_1$ to $\mathcal{L}_2$ is the minimal number $k$ such that for every word from $\mathcal{L}_1$ there exists a word in $\mathcal{L}_2$ with edit distance at most $k$. We study the edit distance computation problem between pushdown automata and their subclasses. The problem of computing edit distance to a pushdown automaton is undecidable, and in practice, the interesting question is to compute the edit distance from a pushdown automaton (the implementation, a standard model for programs with recursion) to a regular language (the specification). In this work, we present a complete picture of decidability and complexity for the following problems: (1)~deciding whether, for a given threshold $k$, the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is at most $k$, and (2)~deciding whether the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is finite.Comment: An extended version of a paper accepted to ICALP 2015 with the same title. The paper has been accepted to the LMCS journa

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

Complementation and Inclusion of Weighted Automata on Infinite Trees: Revised Version

Weighted automata can be seen as a natural generalization of finite state automata to more complex algebraic structures. The standard reasoning tasks for unweighted automata can also be generalized to the weighted setting. In this report we study the problems of intersection, complementation, and inclusion for weighted automata on infinite trees and show that they are not harder complexity-wise than reasoning with unweighted automata. We also present explicit methods for solving these problems optimally