Recently there has been a significant effort to handle quantitative properties in formal verification and synthesis. While weighted automata over finite and infinite words provide a natural and flexible framework to express quantitative properties, perhaps surprisingly, some basic system properties such as average response time cannot be expressed using weighted automata, nor in any other know decidable formalism. In this work, we introduce nested weighted automata as a natural extension of weighted automata which makes it possible to express important quantitative properties such as average response time. In nested weighted automata, a master automaton spins off and collects results from weighted slave automata, each of which computes a quantity along a finite portion of an infinite word. Nested weighted automata can be viewed as the quantitative analogue of monitor automata, which are used in run-time verification. We establish an almost complete decidability picture for the basic decision problems about nested weighted automata, and illustrate their applicability in several domains. In particular, nested weighted automata can be used to decide average response time properties.
Register automata. Another related model for specifying quantitative properties are @cite_19 , which are parametrized by cost functions. The main differences between @cite_19 and nested weighted automata are as follows: (i) register automata are over finite words, whereas we consider infinite words, and (ii) we consider nested control of automata, whereas register automaton are non-nested. As a result, both in terms of expressiveness and decidability results nested weighted automata are very different from register automata. For example, the emptiness of register automata with max and sum value functions is decidable, while we show emptiness to be undecidable for deterministic nested weighted automata with these value functions.
@cite_19
1835836356 2178359813 2096531026 2131886132
Weighted automata map input words to numerical values. Applications of weighted automata include formal verification of quantitative properties, as well as text, speech, and image processing. In the 90's, Krob studied the decidability of problems on rational series, which strongly relate to weighted automata. In particular, it follows from Krob's results that the universality problem (that is, deciding whether the values of all words are below some threshold) is decidable for weighted automata with weights in N ∪ ∞ , and that the equality problem is undecidable when the weights are in N ∪ ∞ . In this paper we continue the study of the borders of decidability in weighted automata, describe alternative and direct proofs of the above results, and tighten them further. Unlike the proofs of Krob, which are algebraic in their nature, our proofs stay in the terrain of state machines, and the reduction is from the halting problem of a two-counter machine. This enables us to significantly simplify Krob's reasoning and strengthen the results to apply already to a very simple class of automata: all the states are accepting, there are no initial nor final weights, and all the weights are from the set -1, 0, 1 . The fact we work directly with automata enables us to tighten also the decidability results and to show that the universality problem for weighted automata with weights in N ∪ ∞ , and in fact even with weights in Q≥0 ∪ ∞ , is PSPACE-complete. Our results thus draw a sharper picture about the decidability of decision problems for weighted automata, in both the front of equality vs. universality and the front of the N ∪ ∞ vs. the Z ∪ ∞ domains. Weighted automata are a generalisation of non-deterministic automata where each transition, in addition to an input letter, has also a quantity expressing the weight (e.g. cost or probability) of its execution. As for non-deterministic automata, their behaviours can be expressed in terms of either (weighted) bisimilarity or (weighted) language equivalence. Coalgebras provide a categorical framework for the uniform study of state-based systems and their behaviours. In this work, we show that coalgebras can suitably model weighted automata in two different ways: coalgebras on Set (the category of sets and functions) characterise weighted bisimilarity, while coalgebras on Vect (the category of vector spaces and linear maps) characterise weighted language equivalence. Relying on the second characterisation, we show three different procedures for computing weighted language equivalence. The first one consists in a generalisation of the usual partition refinement algorithm for ordinary automata. The second one is the backward version of the first one. The third procedure relies on a syntactic representation of rational weighted languages. We introduce new classes of weighted automata on words. Equipped with pebbles and a two-way mechanism, they go beyond the class of recognizable formal power series, but capture a weighted version of first-order logic with bounded transitive closure. In contrast to previous work, this logic allows for unrestricted use of universal quantification. Our main result states that pebble weighted automata, nested weighted automata, and this weighted logic are expressively equivalent. We also give new logical characterizations of the recognizable series. We propose the model of nested words for representation of data with both a linear ordering and a hierarchically nested matching of items. Examples of data with such dual linear-hierarchical structure include executions of structured programs, annotated linguistic data, and HTML XML documents. Nested words generalize both words and ordered trees, and allow both word and tree operations. We define nested word automata—finite-state acceptors for nested words, and show that the resulting class of regular languages of nested words has all the appealing theoretical properties that the classical regular word languages enjoys: deterministic nested word automata are as expressive as their nondeterministic counterparts; the class is closed under union, intersection, complementation, concatenation, Kleene-*, prefixes, and language homomorphisms; membership, emptiness, language inclusion, and language equivalence are all decidable; and definability in monadic second order logic corresponds exactly to finite-state recognizability. We also consider regular languages of infinite nested words and show that the closure properties, MSO-characterization, and decidability of decision problems carry over. The linear encodings of nested words give the class of visibly pushdown languages of words, and this class lies between balanced languages and deterministic context-free languages. We argue that for algorithmic verification of structured programs, instead of viewing the program as a context-free language over words, one should view it as a regular language of nested words (or equivalently, a visibly pushdown language), and this would allow model checking of many properties (such as stack inspection, pre-post conditions) that are not expressible in existing specification logics. We also study the relationship between ordered trees and nested words, and the corresponding automata: while the analysis complexity of nested word automata is the same as that of classical tree automata, they combine both bottom-up and top-down traversals, and enjoy expressiveness and succinctness benefits over tree automata.