23 research outputs found
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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
When is Containment Decidable for Probabilistic Automata?
The containment problem for quantitative automata is the natural quantitative generalisation of the classical language inclusion problem for Boolean automata. We study it for probabilistic automata, where it is known to be undecidable in general. We restrict our study to the class of probabilistic automata with bounded ambiguity. There, we show decidability (subject to Schanuel's conjecture) when one of the automata is assumed to be unambiguous while the other one is allowed to be finitely ambiguous. Furthermore, we show that this is close to the most general decidable fragment of this problem by proving that it is already undecidable if one of the automata is allowed to be linearly ambiguous
The Decidability Frontier for Probabilistic Automata on Infinite Words
We consider probabilistic automata on infinite words with acceptance defined
by safety, reachability, B\"uchi, coB\"uchi, and limit-average conditions. We
consider quantitative and qualitative decision problems. We present extensions
and adaptations of proofs for probabilistic finite automata and present a
complete characterization of the decidability and undecidability frontier of
the quantitative and qualitative decision problems for probabilistic automata
on infinite words
POMDPs under Probabilistic Semantics
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with
limit-average payoff, where a reward value in the interval [0,1] is associated
to every transition, and the payoff of an infinite path is the long-run average
of the rewards. We consider two types of path constraints: (i) quantitative
constraint defines the set of paths where the payoff is at least a given
threshold lambda_1 in (0,1]; and (ii) qualitative constraint which is a special
case of quantitative constraint with lambda_1=1. We consider the computation of
the almost-sure winning set, where the controller needs to ensure that the path
constraint is satisfied with probability 1. Our main results for qualitative
path constraint are as follows: (i) the problem of deciding the existence of a
finite-memory controller is EXPTIME-complete; and (ii) the problem of deciding
the existence of an infinite-memory controller is undecidable. For quantitative
path constraint we show that the problem of deciding the existence of a
finite-memory controller is undecidable.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2013
IST Austria Technical Report
We consider probabilistic automata on infinite words with acceptance defined by safety, reachability, Büchi, coBüchi and limit-average conditions. We consider quantitative and qualitative decision problems. We present extensions and adaptations of proofs of [GO09] and present a precise characterization of the decidability and undecidability frontier of the quantitative and qualitative decision problems
Nonnegativity Problems for Matrix Semigroups
The matrix semigroup membership problem asks, given square matrices
of the same dimension, whether lies in the semigroup
generated by . It is classical that this problem is undecidable
in general but decidable in case commute. In this paper we
consider the problem of whether, given , the semigroup
generated by contains a non-negative matrix. We show that in
case commute, this problem is decidable subject to Schanuel's
Conjecture. We show also that the problem is undecidable if the commutativity
assumption is dropped. A key lemma in our decidability result is a procedure to
determine, given a matrix , whether the sequence of matrices is ultimately nonnegative. This answers a problem posed by S. Akshay
(arXiv:2205.09190). The latter result is in stark contrast to the notorious
fact that it is not known how to determine effectively whether for any specific
matrix index the sequence is ultimately nonnegative
(which is a formulation of the Ultimate Positivity Problem for linear
recurrence sequences)
Nonnegativity problems for matrix semigroups
The matrix semigroup membership problem asks, given square matrices M, M1, ..., Mk of the same dimension, whether M lies in the semigroup generated by M1, ..., Mk. It is classical that this problem is undecidable in general, but decidable in case M1, ..., Mk commute. In this paper we consider the problem of whether, given M1, ..., Mk, the semigroup generated by M1, ..., Mk contains a non-negative matrix. We show that in case M1, ..., Mk commute, this problem is decidable subject to Schanuel's Conjecture. We show also that the problem is undecidable if the commutativity assumption is dropped. A key lemma in our decidability proof is a procedure to determine, given a matrix M, whether the sequence of matrices (Mn)∞n=0 is ultimately nonnegative. This answers a problem posed by S. Akshay [1]. The latter result is in stark contrast to the notorious fact that it is not known how to determine, for any specific matrix index (i, j), whether the sequence (Mn)i,j is ultimately nonnegative. Indeed the latter is equivalent to the Ultimate Positivity Problem for linear recurrence sequences, a longstanding open problem
A Probabilistic Higher-Order Fixpoint Logic
We introduce PHFL, a probabilistic extension of higher-order fixpoint logic,
which can also be regarded as a higher-order extension of probabilistic
temporal logics such as PCTL and the -calculus. We show that PHFL is
strictly more expressive than the -calculus, and that the PHFL
model-checking problem for finite Markov chains is undecidable even for the
-only, order-1 fragment of PHFL. Furthermore the full PHFL is far more
expressive: we give a translation from Lubarsky's -arithmetic to PHFL,
which implies that PHFL model checking is -hard and -hard.
As a positive result, we characterize a decidable fragment of the PHFL
model-checking problems using a novel type system
The big-O problem for labelled markov chains and weighted automata
Given two weighted automata, we consider the problem of whether one is big-O of the other, i.e., if the weight of every finite word in the first is not greater than some constant multiple of the weight in the second. We show that the problem is undecidable, even for the instantiation of weighted automata as labelled Markov chains. Moreover, even when it is known that one weighted automaton is big-O of another, the problem of finding or approximating the associated constant is also undecidable. Our positive results show that the big-O problem is polynomial-time solvable for unambiguous automata, coNP-complete for unlabelled weighted automata (i.e., when the alphabet is a single character) and decidable, subject to Schanuel’s conjecture, when the language is bounded (i.e., a subset of w_1^* … w_m^* for some finite words w_1,… ,w_m). On labelled Markov chains, the problem can be restated as a ratio total variation distance, which, instead of finding the maximum difference between the probabilities of any two events, finds the maximum ratio between the probabilities of any two events. The problem is related to ε-differential privacy, for which the optimal constant of the big-O notation is exactly exp(ε)
Alternating Tree Automata with Qualitative Semantics
We study alternating automata with qualitative semantics over infinite binary trees: Alternation means that two opposing players construct a decoration of the input tree called a run, and the qualitative semantics says that a run of the automaton is accepting if almost all branches of the run are accepting. In this article, we prove a positive and a negative result for the emptiness problem of alternating automata with qualitative semantics. The positive result is the decidability of the emptiness problem for the case of Büchi acceptance condition. An interesting aspect of our approach is that we do not extend the classical solution for solving the emptiness problem of alternating automata, which first constructs an equivalent non-deterministic automaton. Instead, we directly construct an emptiness game making use of imperfect information. The negative result is the undecidability of the emptiness problem for the case of co-Büchi acceptance condition. This result has two direct consequences: The undecidability of monadic second-order logic extended with the qualitative path-measure quantifier and the undecidability of the emptiness problem for alternating tree automata with non-zero semantics, a recently introduced probabilistic model of alternating tree automata