Analogous to regular string and tree languages, regular languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are defined in the literature. Although called regular, those DAG-languages are more powerful and, consequently, standard problems have a higher complexity than in the string case. Top-down as well as bottom-up deterministic DAG languages are subclasses of the regular DAG languages. We refine this hierarchy by providing a weaker subclass of the deterministic DAG languages. For a DAG grammar generating a language in this new DAG language class, or, equivalently, a DAG-automaton recognizing it, a classical deterministic finite state automaton (DFA) can be constructed. As the main result, we provide a characterization of this class.
The motivation behind this is the transfer of techniques for regular string languages to graphs. Trivially, our restricted DAG language class is closed under union and intersection. This permits the application of minimization and hyper-minimization algorithms known for DFAs. This alternative notion of regularity coins at the existence of a DFA for recognizing a DAG language.
We investigate the accepting state complexity of deterministic finite automata for regular languages obtained by applying one of the following operations to languages accepted by permutation automata: union, quotient, complement, difference, intersection, Kleene star, Kleene plus, and reversal. The paper thus joins the study of accepting state complexity of regularity preserving language operations which was initiated by the work [J. Dassow: On the number of accepting states of finite automata, J. Autom., Lang. Comb., 21, 2016]. We show that for almost all of the operations, except for reversa…
Unambiguous Büchi automata, i.e. Büchi automata allowing only one accepting run per word, are a useful restriction of Büchi automata that is well-suited for probabilistic model-checking. In this paper we propose a more permissive variant, namely finitely ambiguous Büchi automata, a generalisation where each word has at most $k$ accepting runs, for some fixed $k$. We adapt existing notions and results concerning finite and bounded ambiguity of finite automata to the setting of $ω$-languages and present a translation from arbitrary nondeterministic Büchi automata with $n$ states to finitely ambi…
Parametric timed automata (PTA) extend timed automata with unknown constants ("parameters"), at the price of undecidability of most interesting problems. The (untimed) language preservation problem ("given a parameter valuation, can we find at least one other valuation with the same untimed language?") is undecidable for PTAs. We prove that this problem remains undecidable for parametric event-recording automata (PERAs), a subclass of PTAs that considerably restrains the way the language can be used; we also show it remains undecidable even for slightly different definitions of the language, i…
Different classes of automata on infinite words have different expressive power. Deciding whether a given language $L \subseteq Σ^ω$ can be expressed by an automaton of a desired class can be reduced to deciding a game between Prover and Refuter: in each turn of the game, Refuter provides a letter in $Σ$, and Prover responds with an annotation of the current state of the run (for example, in the case of Büchi automata, whether the state is accepting or rejecting, and in the case of parity automata, what the color of the state is). Prover wins if the sequence of annotations she generates is cor…
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…
The determinization of a nondeterministic Büchi automaton (NBA) is a fundamental construction of automata theory, with applications to probabilistic verification and reactive synthesis. The standard determinization constructions, such as the ones based on the Safra-Piterman's approach, work on the whole NBA. In this work we propose a divide-and-conquer determinization approach. To this end, we first classify the strongly connected components (SCCs) of the given NBA as inherently weak, deterministic accepting, and nondeterministic accepting. We then present how to determinize each type of SCC i…
Probabilistic Büchi automata are a natural generalization of PFA to infinite words, but have been studied in-depth only rather recently and many interesting questions are still open. PBA are known to accept, in general, a class of languages that goes beyond the regular languages. In this work we extend the known classes of restricted PBA which are still regular, strongly relying on notions concerning ambiguity in classical omega-automata. Furthermore, we investigate the expressivity of the not yet considered but natural class of weak PBA, and we also show that the regularity problem for weak P…
We introduce the category of dependency automata. A dependency automaton consists of two nondeterministic finite automata, with a relation between their states satisfying conditions. This category is equivalent to deterministic finite automata interpreted in join-semilattices i.e. JSL-dfas. The canonical dependency automaton accepting $L$ amounts to the state-minimal dfas for $L$ and $rev(L)$ connected by the `dependency relation'. We describe many canonical JSL-dfas as dependency automata and also explain/extend Brzozowski's algorithm. Call an nfa `subatomic' if its individual states accept a…
We introduce languages of higher-dimensional automata (HDAs) and develop some of their properties. To this end, we define a new category of precubical sets, uniquely naturally isomorphic to the standard one, and introduce a notion of event consistency. HDAs are then finite, labeled, event-consistent precubical sets with distinguished subsets of initial and accepting cells. Their languages are sets of interval orders closed under subsumption; as a major technical step we expose a bijection between interval orders and a subclass of HDAs. We show that any finite subsumption-closed set of interval…
Affine finite automata (AfA) can be more succinct than probabilistic and quantum finite automata when recognizing some regular languages with bounded-error. In this paper, we improve previously known constructions given for the succinctness of AfAs in three ways. First, we replace some of fixed error bounds with arbitrarily small error bounds. Second, we present new constructions by using less states than the previous constructions. Third, we show that any language recognized by a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) is also recognized by bounded-error AfAs having one more state, and so, Af…
A word w is called a synchronizing (recurrent, reset) word of a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) if w brings all states of the automaton to some state; a DFA that has a synchronizing word is said to be synchronizing. Cerny conjectured in 1964 that every n-state synchronizing DFA possesses a synchronizing word of length at most (n -1)2. We consider automaton with aperiodic transition monoid (such automaton is called aperiodic). We show that every synchronizing n-state aperiodic automaton has a synchronizing word of length at most n(n-2)+1. Thus, for aperiodic automaton as well as for automa…
Gran Sasso Science Institute（格兰萨索科学研究所）；University of Udine（乌迪内大学）；University Ca’ Foscari（威尼斯福斯卡里大学）
The states of a deterministic finite automaton A can be identified with collections of words in Pf(L(A)) -- the set of prefixes of words belonging to the regular language accepted by A. But words can be ordered and among the many possible orders a very natural one is the co-lexicographic one. Such naturalness stems from the fact that it suggests a transfer of the order from words to the automaton's states. In a number of papers automata admitting a total ordering of states coherent with the ordering of the set of words reaching them have been proposed. Such class of ordered automata -- the Whe…
We show that a cellular automaton on a mixing subshift of finite type is a Von Neumann regular element in the semigroup of cellular automata if and only if it is split epic onto its image in the category of sofic shifts and block maps. It follows from [S.-Törmä, 2015] that Von Neumann regularity is decidable condition, and we decide it for all elementary CA.
We propose a query learning algorithm for residual symbolic finite automata (RSFAs). Symbolic finite automata (SFAs) are finite automata whose transitions are labeled by predicates over a Boolean algebra, in which a big collection of characters leading the same transition may be represented by a single predicate. Residual finite automata (RFAs) are a special type of non-deterministic finite automata which can be exponentially smaller than the minimum deterministic finite automata and have a favorable property for learning algorithms. RSFAs have both properties of SFAs and RFAs and can have mor…
We show that a cellular automaton on a one-dimensional two-sided mixing subshift of finite type is a von Neumann regular element in the semigroup of cellular automata if and only if it is split epic onto its image in the category of sofic shifts and block maps. It follows from previous joint work of the author and Törmä that von Neumann regularity is a decidable condition, and we decide it for all elementary CA, obtaining the optimal radii for weak generalized inverses. Two sufficient conditions for non-regularity are having a proper sofic image or having a point in the image with no preimage …
Register automata are finite automata equipped with a finite set of registers ranging over the domain of some relational structure like $(\mathbb N;=)$ or $(\mathbb Q;<)$. Register automata process words over the domain, and along a run of the automaton, the registers can store data from the input word for later comparisons. It is long known that the universality problem, i.e., the problem to decide whether a given register automaton accepts all words over the domain, is undecidable. Recently, we proved the problem to be decidable in 2-ExpSpace if the register automaton under study is over $(\…
We examine the behaviors of various models of $k$-limited automata, which naturally extend Hibbard's [Inf. Control, vol. 11, pp. 196--238, 1967] scan limited automata, each of which is a single-tape linear-bounded automaton satisfying the $k$-limitedness requirement that the content of each tape cell should be modified only during the first $k$ visits of a tape head. One central computation model is a probabilistic $k$-limited automaton (abbreviated as a $k$-lpa), which accepts an input exactly when its accepting states are reachable from its initial state with probability more than 1/2 within…
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…
