Subzero automata is a class of tree automata whose acceptance condition can express probabilistic constraints. Our main result is that the problem of determining if a subzero automaton accepts some regular tree is decidable.
Model checkers for timed automata are widely used to verify safety-critical, real-time systems. State-of-the-art tools achieve scalability by intricate abstractions. We aim at further increasing the trust in their verification results, in particular for checking liveness properties. To this end, we develop an approach for extracting certificates for the emptiness of timed Büchi automata from model checking runs. These certificates can be double-checked by a certifier that we formally verify in Isabelle/HOL. We study liveness certificates in an abstract setting and show that our approach is sou…
This paper proves the decidability of the emptiness problem for two models which recognize graphs: graph-walking automata, and tilings of graphs by star subgraphs (star automata). Furthermore, it is proved that the non-emptiness problem for graph-walking automata (that is, whether a given automaton accepts at least one graph) is NEXP-complete. For star automata, which generalize nondeterministic tree automata to the case of graphs, it is proved that their non-emptiness problem is NP-complete.
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 paper 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…
The model of tree automata with equality and disequality constraints was introduced in 2007 by Filiot, Talbot and Tison. In this paper we show that if there is at least one disequality constraint, the emptiness problem is NP-hard.
Zero automata are a probabilistic extension of parity automata on infinite trees. The satisfiability of a certain probabilistic variant of mso, called tmso + zero, reduces to the emptiness problem for zero automata. We introduce a variant of zero automata called nonzero automata. We prove that for every zero automaton there is an equivalent nonzero automaton of quadratic size and the emptiness problem of nonzero automata is decidable and both in NP and in coNP. These results imply that tmso + zero has decidable satisfiability.
The languages of infinite timed words accepted by timed automata are traditionally defined using Buchi-like conditions. These acceptance conditions focus on the set of locations visited infinitely often along a run, but completely ignore quantitative timing aspects. In this paper we propose a natural quantitative semantics for timed automata based on the so-called frequency, which measures the proportion of time spent in the accepting locations. We study various properties of timed languages accepted with positive frequency, and in particular the emptiness and universality problems.
A saturation algorithm for collapsible pushdown systems was published in ICALP 2012. This work introduced a class of stack automata used to recognised regular sets of collapsible pushdown configurations. It was shown that these automata form an effective boolean algebra, have a linear time membership problem, and are equivalent to an alternative automata representation appearing in LICS 2010. It was also claimed that the emptiness problem for stack automata is PSPACE-complete. Unfortunately, this claim is not true. We show that the problem is in fact NEXPTIME-complete when the stacks being acc…
Parametric timed automata extend the standard timed automata with the possibility to use parameters in the clock guards. In general, if the parameters are real-valued, the problem of language emptiness of such automata is undecidable even for various restricted subclasses. We thus focus on the case where parameters are assumed to be integer-valued, while the time still remains continuous. On the one hand, we show that the problem remains undecidable for parametric timed automata with three clocks and one parameter. On the other hand, for the case with arbitrary many clocks where only one of th…
The aim of this work is to thoroughly investigate Buchi automata augmented with spatial constraints. The input trees of such an automaton are infinite k-ary Sigma-trees, with the nodes standing for time points, and Sigma including, additionally to its uses in classical k-ary Sigma-trees, the description of the snapshot of an n-object spatial scene of interest. The constraints, from an RCC8-like spatial Relation Algebra (RA) x, are used to impose spatial constraints on objects of the spatial scene, eventually at different nodes of the input trees. We show that a Buchi alternating automaton augm…
The Emptiness Problem for Quantum Finite Automata with Classical States
National Taipei University of Technology(国立台北科技大学);School of Computer Science and Informatics, University of Liverpool(利物浦大学计算机科学与信息学院);National Institute of Informatics and SOKENDAI(日本国立情报学研究所与综合研究大学院大学)
We investigate the decidability of the emptiness problem for three classes of distributed automata. These devices operate on finite directed graphs, acting as networks of identical finite-state machines that communicate in an infinite sequence of synchronous rounds. The problem is shown to be decidable in LogSpace for a class of forgetful automata, where the nodes see the messages received from their neighbors but cannot remember their own state. When restricted to the appropriate families of graphs, these forgetful automata are equivalent to classical finite word automata, but strictly more e…
This work studies which storage mechanisms in automata permit decidability of the emptiness problem. The question is formalized using valence automata, an abstract model of automata in which the storage mechanism is given by a monoid. For each of a variety of storage mechanisms, one can choose a (typically infinite) monoid $M$ such that valence automata over $M$ are equivalent to (one-way) automata with this type of storage. In fact, many important storage mechanisms can be realized by monoids defined by finite graphs, called graph monoids. Examples include pushdown stacks, partially blind cou…
In this paper we study a subclass of pebble automata (PA) for data languages for which the emptiness problem is decidable. Namely, we introduce the so-called top view weak PA. Roughly speaking, top view weak PA are weak PA where the equality test is performed only between the data values seen by the two most recently placed pebbles. The emptiness problem for this model is decidable. We also show that it is robust: alternating, nondeterministic and deterministic top view weak PA have the same recognition power. Moreover, this model is strong enough to accept all data languages expressible in Li…
In this paper, we study the extension of 1-clock Alternating Timed Automata (1-ATA) with the ability to read in both forward and backward direction, the 2-Way 1-clock Alternating Timed Automata (2-Way 1-ATA). We show that subclass of 2-Way 1-ATA with reset free loops (2-Way 1-ATA-rfl) is expressively equivalent to MSO[<] extended with Guarded Metric Quantifiers (GQMSO). Emptiness Checking problem for 2-Way 1-ATA-rfl (and hence GQMSO) is undecidable, in general. We propose a "non-punctuality" like restriction, called non-adjacency, for 2-Way 1-ATA-rfl, and also for GQMSO, for which the emptines…
Automata over infinite alphabets have recently come to be studied extensively as potentially useful tools for solving problems in verification and database theory. One popular model of automata studied is the Class Memory Automata (CMA), for which the emptiness problem is equivalent to Petri Net Reachability. We identify a restriction - which we call weakness - of CMA, and show that their emptiness problem is equivalent to Petri Net Coverability. Further, we show that in the deterministic case they are closed under all Boolean operations. We clarify the connections between weak CMA and existin…
The emptiness and containment problems for probabilistic automata are natural quantitative generalisations of the classical language emptiness and inclusion problems for Boolean automata. It is well known that both problems are undecidable. In this paper we provide a more refined view of these problems in terms of the degree of ambiguity of probabilistic automata. We show that a gap version of the emptiness problem (that is known be undecidable in general) becomes decidable for automata of polynomial ambiguity. We complement this positive result by showing that the emptiness problem remains un…
In [1], we introduced the weakly synchronizing languages for probabilistic automata. In this report, we show that the emptiness problem of weakly synchronizing languages for probabilistic automata is undecidable. This implies that the decidability result of [1-3] for the emptiness problem of weakly synchronizing language is incorrect.
It is well known that the emptiness problem for binary probabilistic automata and so for quantum automata is undecidable. We present the current status of the emptiness problems for unary probabilistic and quantum automata with connections with Skolem's and positivity problems. We also introduce the concept of linear recurrence automata in order to show the connection naturally. Then, we also give possible generalizations of linear recurrence relations and automata on vectors.
We introduce a new class of automata on infinite trees called \emph{alternating nonzero automata}, which extends the class of non-deterministic nonzero automata. We reduce the emptiness problem for alternating nonzero automata to the same problem for non-deterministic ones, which implies decidability. We obtain as a corollary algorithms for the satisfiability of a probabilistic temporal logic extending both CTL* and the qualitative fragment of pCTL*.
The problem DFA-Intersection-Nonemptiness asks if a given number of deterministic automata accept a common word. In general, this problem is PSPACE-complete. Here, we investigate this problem for the subclasses of commutative automata and automata recognizing sparse languages. We show that in both cases DFA-Intersection-Nonemptiness is complete for NP and for the parameterized class $W[1]$, where the number of input automata is the parameter, when the alphabet is fixed. Additionally, we establish the same result for Tables Non-Empty Join, a problem that asks if the join of several tables (poss…
We introduce a model of one-way language acceptors (a variant of a checking stack automaton) and show the following decidability properties: (1) The deterministic version has a decidable membership problem but has an undecidable emptiness problem. (2) The nondeterministic version has an undecidable membership problem and emptiness problem. There are many models of accepting devices for which there is no difference with these problems between deterministic and nondeterministic versions, and the same holds for the emptiness problem. As far as we know, the model we introduce above is the first on…
Motivated by the success of bounded model checking framework for finite state machines, Ouaknine and Worrell proposed a time-bounded theory of real-time verification by claiming that restriction to bounded-time recovers decidability for several key decision problem related to real-time verification. In support of this theory, the list of undecidable problems recently shown decidable under time-bounded restriction is rather impressive: language inclusion for timed automata, emptiness problem for alternating timed automata, and emptiness problem for rectangular hybrid automata. The objective of …
In the Intersection Non-Emptiness problem, we are given a list of finite automata $A_1,A_2,\dots,A_m$ over a common alphabet $Σ$ as input, and the goal is to determine whether some string $w\in Σ^*$ lies in the intersection of the languages accepted by the automata in the list. We analyze the complexity of the Intersection Non-Emptiness problem under the promise that all input automata accept a language in some level of the dot-depth hierarchy, or some level of the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy. Automata accepting languages from the lowest levels of these hierarchies arise naturally in the conte…
Parikh automata extend automata with counters whose values can only be tested at the end of the computation, with respect to membership into a semi-linear set. Parikh automata have found several applications, for instance in transducer theory, as they enjoy decidable emptiness problem. In this paper, we study two-way Parikh automata. We show that emptiness becomes undecidable in the non-deterministic case. However, it is PSpace-C when the number of visits to any input position is bounded and the semi-linear set is given as an existential Presburger formula. We also give tight complexity bounds…
The focus of this paper is the analysis of real-time systems with recursion, through the development of good theoretical techniques which are implementable. Time is modeled using clock variables, and recursion using stacks. Our technique consists of modeling the behaviours of the timed system as graphs, and interpreting these graphs on tree terms by showing a bound on their tree-width. We then build a tree automaton that accepts exactly those tree terms that describe realizable runs of the timed system. The emptiness of the timed system thus boils down to emptiness of a finite tree automaton t…
The Int_reg-problem of a combinatorial problem P asks, given a nondeterministic automaton M as input, whether the language L(M) accepted by M contains any positive instance of the problem P. We consider the Int_reg-problem for a number of different graph problems and give general criteria that give decision procedures for these Int_reg-problems. To achieve this goal, we consider a natural graph encoding so that the language of all graph encodings is regular. Then, we draw the connection between classical pumping- and interchange-arguments from the field of formal language theory with the graph…
Register pushdown automata (RPDA) is an extension of classical pushdown automata to handle data values in a restricted way. RPDA attracts attention as a model of a query language for structured documents with data values. The membership and emptiness problems for RPDA are known to be EXPTIME-complete. This paper shows the membership problem becomes PSPACE-complete and NP-complete for nondecreasing and growing RPDA, respectively, while the emptiness problem remains EXPTIME-complete for these subclasses.
We define a class of languages of infinite words over infinite alphabets, and the corresponding automata. The automata used for recognition are a generalisation of deterministic Muller automata to the setting of nominal sets. Remarkably, the obtained languages are determined by their ultimately periodic fragments, as in the classical case. Closure under complement, union and intersection, and decidability of emptiness and equivalence are preserved by the generalisation. This is shown by using finite representations of the (otherwise infinite-state) defined class of automata.
Automata for unordered unranked trees are relevant for defining schemas and queries for data trees in Json or Xml format. While the existing notions are well-investigated concerning expressiveness, they all lack a proper notion of determinism, which makes it difficult to distinguish subclasses of automata for which problems such as inclusion, equivalence, and minimization can be solved efficiently. In this paper, we propose and investigate different notions of "horizontal determinism", starting from automata for unranked trees in which the horizontal evaluation is performed by finite state aut…
We define a class of ranked tree automata TABG generalizing both the tree automata with local tests between brothers of Bogaert and Tison (1992) and with global equality and disequality constraints (TAGED) of Filiot et al. (2007). TABG can test for equality and disequality modulo a given flat equational theory between brother subterms and between subterms whose positions are defined by the states reached during a computation. In particular, TABG can check that all the subterms reaching a given state are distinct. This constraint is related to monadic key constraints for XML documents, meaning …
An inductive theorem proving method for constrained term rewriting systems, which is based on rewriting induction, needs a decision procedure for reduction-completeness of constrained terms. In addition, the sufficient complete property of constrained term rewriting systems enables us to relax the side conditions of some inference rules in the proving method. These two properties can be reduced to intersection emptiness problems related to sets of ground instances for constrained terms. This paper proposes a method to construct deterministic, complete, and constraint-complete constrained tree …
A data tree is an unranked ordered tree where each node carries a label from a finite alphabet and a datum from some infinite domain. We consider the two variable first order logic FO2(<,+1,~) over data trees. Here +1 refers to the child and the next sibling relations while < refers to the descendant and following sibling relations. Moreover, ~ is a binary predicate testing data equality. We exhibit an automata model, denoted DAD# that is more expressive than FO2(<,+1,~) but such that emptiness of DAD# and satisfiability of FO2(<,+1,~) are inter-reducible. This is proved via a model of counter…
We introduce first order alternating automata, a generalization of boolean alternating automata, in which transition rules are described by multisorted first order formulae, with states and internal variables given by uninterpreted predicate terms. The model is closed under union, intersection and complement, and its emptiness problem is undecidable, even for the simplest data theory of equality. To cope with this limitation, we develop an abstraction refinement semi-algorithm based on lazy annotation of the symbolic execution paths with interpolants, obtained by applying (i) quantifier elimin…
Probabilistic automata are an extension of nondeterministic finite automata in which transitions are annotated with probabilities. Despite its simplicity, this model is very expressive and many of the associated algorithmic questions are undecidable. In this work we focus on the emptiness problem (and its variant the value problem), which asks whether a given probabilistic automaton accepts some word with probability greater than a given threshold. We consider a natural and well-studied structural restriction on automata, namely the degree of ambiguity, which is defined as the maximum number o…
Parikh automata extend finite automata by counters that can be tested for membership in a semilinear set, but only at the end of a run, thereby preserving many of the desirable algorithmic properties of finite automata. Here, we study the extension of the classical framework onto infinite inputs: We introduce reachability, safety, Büchi, and co-Büchi Parikh automata on infinite words and study expressiveness, closure properties, and the complexity of verification problems. We show that almost all classes of automata have pairwise incomparable expressiveness, both in the deterministic and the n…
$μ$-Calculus and automata on infinite trees are complementary ways of describing infinite tree languages. The correspondence between $μ$-Calculus and alternating tree automaton is used to solve the satisfiability and model checking problems by compiling the modal $μ$-Calculus formula into an alternating tree automata. Thus advocating an automaton model specially tailored for working with modal $μ$-Calculus. The advantage of the automaton model is its ability to deal with arbitrary branching in a much simpler way as compare to the one proposed by Janin and Walukiewicz. Both problems (i.e., mode…
Extensions to finite-state automata on strings, such as multi-head automata or multi-counter automata, have been successfully used to encode many infinite-state non-regular verification problems. In this paper, we consider a generalization of automata-theoretic infinite-state verification from strings to labeled series-parallel graphs. We define a model of non-deterministic, 2-way, concurrent automata working on series-parallel graphs and communicating through shared registers on the nodes of the graph. We consider the following verification problem: given a family of series-parallel graphs de…
We address the verification problem of ordered multi-pushdown automata: A multi-stack extension of pushdown automata that comes with a constraint on stack transitions such that a pop can only be performed on the first non-empty stack. First, we show that the emptiness problem for ordered multi-pushdown automata is in 2ETIME. Then, we prove that, for an ordered multi-pushdown automata, the set of all predecessors of a regular set of configurations is an effectively constructible regular set. We exploit this result to solve the global model-checking which consists in computing the set of all con…
We make a connection between the subgroup membership and identity problems for matrix groups and extended finite automata. We provide an alternative proof for the decidability of the subgroup membership problem for $ 2 \times 2 $ integer matrices. We show that the emptiness problem for extended finite automata over $ 4 \times 4 $ integer matrix semigroups is undecidable. We prove that the decidability of the universe problem for extended finite automata is a sufficient condition for the decidability of the subgroup membership and identity problems.
In this paper we review algorithms for checking diagnosability of discrete-event systems and timed automata. We point out that the diagnosability problems in both cases reduce to the emptiness problem for (timed) Büchi automata. Moreover, it is known that, checking whether a discrete-event system is diagnosable, can also be reduced to checking bounded diagnosability. We establish a similar result for timed automata. We also provide a synthesis of the complexity results for the different fault diagnosis problems.
We propose a novel automata model over the alphabet of rational numbers, which we call register automata over the rationals (RA-Q). It reads a sequence of rational numbers and outputs another rational number. RA-Q is an extension of the well-known register automata (RA) over infinite alphabets, which are finite automata equipped with a finite number of registers/variables for storing values. Like in the standard RA, the RA-Q model allows both equality and ordering tests between values. It, moreover, allows to perform linear arithmetic between certain variables. The model is quite expressive: i…
We consider the value 1 problem for probabilistic automata over finite words: it asks whether a given probabilistic automaton accepts words with probability arbitrarily close to 1. This problem is known to be undecidable. However, different algorithms have been proposed to partially solve it; it has been recently shown that the Markov Monoid algorithm, based on algebra, is the most correct algorithm so far. The first contribution of this paper is to give a characterisation of the Markov Monoid algorithm. The second contribution is to develop a profinite theory for probabilistic automata, calle…
In this paper, we define the class of hourglass automata, which are timed automata with bounded clocks that can be made to progress backwards as well as forwards at a constant rate. We then introduce a new clock update for timed automata that allows hourglass automata to be expressed. This allows us to show that language emptiness remains decidable with this update when the number of clocks is two or less. This is done by showing that we can construct a finite untimed graph using clock regions from any timed automaton that use this new update.
Probabilistic Büchi Automata (PBA) are randomized, finite state automata that process input strings of infinite length. Based on the threshold chosen for the acceptance probability, different classes of languages can be defined. In this paper, we present a number of results that clarify the power of such machines and properties of the languages they define. The broad themes we focus on are as follows. We present results on the decidability and precise complexity of the emptiness, universality and language containment problems for such machines, thus answering questions central to the use of th…