Formal languages are in the core of models of computation and their behavior. A rich family of models for many classes of languages have been widely studied. Hyperproperties lift conventional trace-based languages from a set of execution traces to a set of sets of executions. Hyperproperties have been shown to be a powerful formalism for expressing and reasoning about information-flow security policies and important properties of cyber-physical systems. Although there is an extensive body of work on formal-language representation of trace properties, we currently lack such a general characterization for hyperproperties. We introduce hyperlanguages over finite words and models for expressing them. Essentially, these models express multiple words by using assignments to quantified word variables. Relying on the standard models for regular languages, we propose hyperregular expressions and finite-word hyperautomata (NFH), for modeling the class of regular hyperlanguages. We demonstrate the ability of regular hyperlanguages to express hyperproperties for finite traces. We explore the closure properties and the complexity of the fundamental decision problems such as nonemptiness, universality, membership, and containment for various fragments of NFH.
Hyperproperties lift conventional trace-based languages from a set of execution traces to a set of sets of executions. From a formal-language perspective, these are sets of sets of words, namely hyperlanguages. Hyperautomata are based on classical automata models that are lifted to handle hyperlanguages. Finite hyperautomata (NFH) have been suggested to express regular hyperproperties. We study the realizability problem for regular hyperlanguages: given a set of languages, can it be precisely described by an NFH? We show that the problem is complex already for singleton hyperlanguages. We then…
Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学计算机科学系）；Department of Software Engineering, ORT Braude College（ORT布拉德学院软件工程系）
Hyperproperties lift conventional trace properties from a set of execution traces to a set of sets of execution traces. Hyperproperties have been shown to be a powerful formalism for expressing and reasoning about information-flow security policies and important properties of cyber-physical systems such as sensitivity and robustness, as well as consistency conditions in distributed computing such as linearizability. Although there is an extensive body of work on automata-based representation of trace properties, we currently lack such characterization for hyperproperties. We introduce hyperaut…
We prove several results concerning finitely generated submonoids of the free monoid. These results generalize those known for free submonoids. We prove in particular that if $X=Y\circ Z$ is a composition of finite sets of words with $Y$ complete, then $d(X)\le d(Y)d(Z)$.
Let $S$ be one of $\{aba,bcb\}$ and $\{aba, aca\}$, and let $w$ be an infinite square-free word over $Σ=\{a,b,c\}$ with no factor in $S$. Suppose that $f:Σ\rightarrow T^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. Word $f(w)$ is square-free if and only if $f$ is square-free on factors of $w$ of length 8 or less.
G. Fici proved that a finite word has a minimal suffix automaton if and only if all its left special factors occur as prefixes. He called LSP all finite and infinite words having this latter property. We characterize here infinite LSP words in terms of $S$-adicity. More precisely we provide a finite set of morphisms $S$ and an automaton ${\cal A}$ such that an infinite word is LSP if and only if it is $S$-adic and all its directive words are recognizable by ${\cal A}$.
We solve open problems concerning the Kleene star $L^*$ of a finite set $L$ of words over an alphabet $Σ$. The \emph{Frobenius monoid} problem is the question for a given finite set of words $L$, whether the language $L^*$ is cofinite. We show that it is PSPACE-complete. We also exhibit an infinite family of sets $L$ such that the length of the longest words not in $L^*$ (when $L^*$ is cofinite) is exponential in the length of the longest words in $L$ and subexponential in the sum of the lengths of words in $L$. The \emph{factor universality} problem is the question for a given finite set of w…
A deterministic finite automaton is directable if it has a directing word which takes the automaton from every state to the same state. These notions have been extended also to other kinds of automata. Thus, B.~Imreh and M.~Steinby (1999) identified three natural types of directing words, called D1-, D2- and D3-directing words, for nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs). Here we adapt these notions for fuzzy finite automata (FFAs). The D3-directing words obtained this way are precisely the directing words introduced by V.~Karthikeyan and M. Rajasekar (2015). With any FFA F we associate an NFA…
Given a finite alphabet $Σ$ and a right-infinite word $w$ over the alphabet $Σ$, we construct a topological space ${\rm Rec}(w)$ consisting of all right-infinite recurrent words whose factors are all factors of $w$, where we work up to an equivalence in which two words are equivalent if they have the exact same set of factors (finite contiguous subwords). We show that ${\rm Rec}(w)$ can be endowed with a natural topology and we show that if $w$ is word of linear factor complexity then ${\rm Rec}(w)$ is a finite topological space. In addition, we note that there are examples which show that if …
Given a subset of states $S$ of a deterministic finite automaton and a word $w$, the preimage is the subset of all states mapped to a state in $S$ by the action of $w$. We study three natural problems concerning words giving certain preimages. The first problem is whether, for a given subset, there exists a word \emph{extending} the subset (giving a larger preimage). The second problem is whether there exists a \emph{totally extending} word (giving the whole set of states as a preimage)---equivalently, whether there exists an \emph{avoiding} word for the complementary subset. The third problem…
This paper situates itself in the theory of variable length codes and of finite automata where the concepts of completeness and synchronization play a central role. In this theoretical setting, we investigate the problem of finding upper bounds to the minimal length of synchronizing words and incompletable words of a finite language X in terms of the length of the words of X. This problem is related to two well-known conjectures formulated by Cerny and Restivo, respectively. In particular, if Restivo's conjecture is true, our main result provides a quadratic bound for the minimal length of a s…
We study finite-state transducers and their power for transforming infinite words. Infinite sequences of symbols are of paramount importance in a wide range of fields, from formal languages to pure mathematics and physics. While finite automata for recognising and transforming languages are well-understood, very little is known about the power of automata to transform infinite words. The word transformation realised by finite-state transducers gives rise to a complexity comparison of words and thereby induces equivalence classes, called (transducer) degrees, and a partial order on these degree…
We consider two-variable first-order logic $\text{FO}^2$ and its quantifier alternation hierarchies over both finite and infinite words. Our main results are forbidden patterns for deterministic automata (finite words) and for Carton-Michel automata (infinite words). In order to give concise patterns, we allow the use of subwords on paths in finite graphs. This concept is formalized as subword-patterns. For certain types of subword-patterns there exists a non-deterministic logspace algorithm to decide their presence or absence in a given automaton. In particular, this leads to $\mathbf{NL}$ al…
We consider the previously defined notion of finite-state independence and we focus specifically on normal words. We characterize finite-state independence of normal words in three different ways, using three different kinds of asynchronous deterministic finite automata with two input tapes containing infinite words. Based on one of the characterizations we give an algorithm to construct a pair of finite-state independent normal words.
In this work we introduce a notion of independence based on finite-state automata: two infinite words are independent if no one helps to compress the other using one-to-one finite-state transducers with auxiliary input. We prove that, as expected, the set of independent pairs of infinite words has Lebesgue measure 1. We show that the join of two independent normal words is normal. However, the independence of two normal words is not guaranteed if we just require that their join is normal. To prove this we construct a normal word $x_1x_2x_3\ldots$ where $x_{2n}=x_n$ for every $n$.
We consider two natural problems about nondeterministic finite automata. First, given such an automaton M of n states, and a length l, does M accept a word of length l? We show that the classic problem of triangle-free graph recognition reduces to this problem, and give an O(n^ω (log n)^{1+ε} log l)-time algorithm to solve it, where ω is the optimal exponent for matrix multiplication. Second, provided L(M) is finite, we consider the problem of listing the lengths of all words accepted by M. Although this problem seems like it might be significantly harder, we show that this problem can be solv…
Motivated by the question of which completely regular semigroups have context-free word problem, we show that for certain classes of languages $\mathfrak{C}$(including context-free), every completely regular semigroup that is a union of finitely many finitely generated groups with word problem in $\mathfrak{C}$ also has word problem in $\mathfrak{C}$. We give an example to show that not all completely regular semigroups with context-free word problem can be so constructed.
In the classic problem of sequence prediction, a predictor receives a sequence of values from an emitter and tries to guess the next value before it appears. The predictor masters the emitter if there is a point after which all of the predictor's guesses are correct. In this paper we consider the case in which the predictor is an automaton and the emitted values are drawn from a finite set; i.e., the emitted sequence is an infinite word. We examine the predictive capabilities of finite automata, pushdown automata, stack automata (a generalization of pushdown automata), and multihead finite aut…
A prefix normal word is a binary word whose prefixes contain at least as many 1s as any of its factors of the same length. Introduced by Fici and Lipták in 2011 the notion of prefix normality is so far only defined for words over the binary alphabet. In this work we investigate a generalisation for finite words over arbitrary finite alphabets, namely weighted prefix normality. We prove that weighted prefix normality is more expressive than binary prefix normality. Furthermore, we investigate the existence of a weighted prefix normal form since weighted prefix normality comes with several new p…
We explore a natural class of semigroups that have word problem decidable by finite state automata. Among the main results are invariance of this property under change of generators, invariance under basic algebraic constructions and algebraic properties of these semigroups.
The question whether P equals NP revolves around the discrepancy between active production and mere verification by Turing machines. In this paper, we examine the analogous problem for finite transducers and automata. Every nondeterministic finite transducer defines a binary relation associating each input word with all output words that the transducer can successfully produce on the given input. Finite-valued transducers are those for which there is a finite upper bound on the number of output words that the relation associates with every input word. We characterize finite-valued, functional,…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping the pattern into every word. We present various complexity-related properties of unavoidable words. For words that are unavoidable, we provide an upper bound to the lengths of words that avoid them. A natural subsequent question is how many unavoidable words there are. We show that the fraction of words that are unavoidable drops exponentially fast in the len…
Let $NFA_b(q)$ denote the set of languages accepted by nondeterministic finite automata with $q$ states over an alphabet with $b$ letters. Let $B_n$ denote the set of words of length $n$. We give a quadratic lower bound on the VC dimension of \[ NFA_2(q)\cap B_n = \{L\cap B_n \mid L \in NFA_2(q)\} \] as a function of $q$. Next, the work of Gruber and Holzer (2007) gives an upper bound for the nondeterministic state complexity of finite languages contained in $B_n$, which we strengthen using our methods. Finally, we give some theoretical and experimental results on the dependence on $n$ of the …
In this paper, we investigate the synthesis problem of terminating reactive systems from quantitative specifications. Such systems are modeled as finite transducers whose executions are represented as finite words in $(I\times O)^*$, where $I,O$ are finite sets of input and output symbols, respectively. A weighted specification $S$ assigns a rational value (or $-\infty$) to words in $(I\times O)^*$, and we consider three kinds of objectives for synthesis, namely threshold objectives where the system's executions are required to be above some given threshold, best-value and approximate objectiv…
In 1999 Lyngsø and Pedersen proposed a conjecture stating that every binary circular word of length $n$ with equal number of zeros and ones has an antipalindromic linear subsequence of length at least $\frac{2}{3}n$. No progress over a trivial $\frac{1}{2}n$ bound has been achieved since then. We suggest a palindromic counterpart to this conjecture and provide a non-trivial infinite series of circular words which prove the upper bound of $\frac{2}{3}n$ for both conjectures at the same time. The construction also works for words over an alphabet of size $k$ and gives rise to a generalization of…
In 2013, Fici and Zamboni proved a number of theorems about finite and infinite words having only a small number of factors that are palindromes. In this paper we rederive some of their results, and obtain some new ones, by a different method based on finite automata.
A finite word is closed if it contains a factor that occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix but does not have internal occurrences, otherwise it is open. We are interested in the {\it oc-sequence} of a word, which is the binary sequence whose $n$-th element is $0$ if the prefix of length $n$ of the word is open, or $1$ if it is closed. We exhibit results showing that this sequence is deeply related to the combinatorial and periodic structure of a word. In the case of Sturmian words, we show that these are uniquely determined (up to renaming letters) by their oc-sequence. Moreover, we prove th…
Two finite words $u$ and $v$ are $k$-binomially equivalent if, for each word $x$ of length at most $k$, $x$ appears the same number of times as a subsequence (i.e., as a scattered subword) of both $u$ and $v$. This notion generalizes abelian equivalence. In this paper, we study the equivalence classes induced by the $k$-binomial equivalence with a special focus on the cardinalities of the classes. We provide an algorithm generating the $2$-binomial equivalence class of a word. For $k \geq 2$ and alphabet of $3$ or more symbols, the language made of lexicographically least elements of every $k$…
Determining the minimum number of states required by a finite automaton to separate a given pair of different words is an important problem. In this paper, we consider this problem for quantum automata (QFAs). We show that 2-state QFAs can separate any pair of words in nondeterministic acceptance mode and conjecture that they can separate any pair also with zero-error. Then, we focus on (a more general problem) separating a pair of two disjoint finite set of words. We show that QFAs can separate them efficiently in nondeterministic acceptance mode, i.e. the number of states is two to the power…
We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is a FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides a simple proof that Lyndon's preservation theorem fails on finite structures. We additionally show that given a regular language, it is undecidable whether it is definable in FO+.
We propose FC, a new logic on words that combines finite model theory with the theory of concatenation - a first-order logic that is based on word equations. Like the theory of concatenation, FC is built around word equations; in contrast to it, its semantics are defined to only allow finite models, by limiting the universe to a word and all its factors. As a consequence of this, FC has many of the desirable properties of FO on finite models, while being far more expressive than FO[<]. Most noteworthy among these desirable properties are sufficient criteria for efficient model checking, and ca…
