No Arabic abstract
We study the expressiveness and succinctness of good-for-games pushdown automata (GFG-PDA) over finite words, that is, pushdown automata whose nondeterminism can be resolved based on the run constructed so far, but independently of the remainder of the input word. We prove that GFG-PDA recognise more languages than deterministic PDA (DPDA) but not all context-free languages (CFL). This class is orthogonal to unambiguous CFL. We further show that GFG-PDA can be exponentially more succinct than DPDA, while PDA can be double-exponentially more succinct than GFG-PDA. We also study GFGness in visibly pushdown automata (VPA), which enjoy better closure properties than PDA, and for which we show GFGness to be EXPTIME-complete. GFG-VPA can be exponentially more succinct than deterministic VPA, while VPA can be exponentially more succinct than GFG-VPA. Both of these lower bounds are tight. Finally, we study the complexity of resolving nondeterminism in GFG-PDA. Every GFG-PDA has a positional resolver, a function that resolves nondeterminism and that is only dependant on the current configuration. Pushdown transducers are sufficient to implement the resolvers of GFG-VPA, but not those of GFG-PDA. GFG-PDA with finite-state resolvers are determinisable.
We propose an efficient algorithm for determinising counting automata (CAs), i.e., finite automata extended with bounded counters. The algorithm avoids unfolding counters into control states, unlike the naive approach, and thus produces much smaller deterministic automata. We also develop a simplified and faster version of the general algorithm for the sub-class of so-called monadic CAs (MCAs), i.e., CAs with counting loops on character classes, which are common in practice. Our main motivation is (besides applications in verification and decision procedures of logics) the application of deterministic (M)CAs in pattern matching regular expressions with counting, which are very common in e.g. network traffic processing and log analysis. We have evaluated our algorithm against practical benchmarks from these application domains and concluded that compared to the naive approach, our algorithm is much less prone to explode, produces automata that can be several orders of magnitude smaller, and is overall faster.
We present an underapproximation for context-free languages by filtering out runs of the underlying pushdown automaton depending on how the stack height evolves over time. In particular, we assign to each run a number quantifying the oscillating behavior of the stack along the run. We study languages accepted by pushdown automata restricted to k-oscillating runs. We relate oscillation on pushdown automata with a counterpart restriction on context-free grammars. We also provide a way to filter all but the k-oscillating runs from a given PDA by annotating stack symbols with information about the oscillation. Finally, we study closure properties of the defined class of languages and the complexity of the k-emptiness problem asking, given a pushdown automaton P and k >= 0, whether P has a k-oscillating run. We show that, when k is not part of the input, the k-emptiness problem is NLOGSPACE-complete.
We introduce the notion of adaptive synchronisation for pushdown automata, in which there is an external observer who has no knowledge about the current state of the pushdown automaton, but can observe the contents of the stack. The observer would then like to decide if it is possible to bring the automaton from any state into some predetermined state by giving inputs to it in an emph{adaptive} manner, i.e., the next input letter to be given can depend on how the contents of the stack changed after the current input letter. We show that for non-deterministic pushdown automata, this problem is 2-EXPTIME-complete and for deterministic pushdown automata, we show EXPTIME-completeness. To prove the lower bounds, we first introduce (different variants of) subset-synchronisation and show that these problems are polynomial-time equivalent with the adaptive synchronisation problem. We then prove hardness results for the subset-synchronisation problems. For proving the upper bounds, we consider the problem of deciding if a given alternating pushdown system has an accepting run with at most $k$ leaves and we provide an $n^{O(k^2)}$ time algorithm for this problem.
This paper studies a large class of two-player perfect-information turn-based parity games on infinite graphs, namely those generated by collapsible pushdown automata. The main motivation for studying these games comes from the connections from collapsible pushdown automata and higher-order recursion schemes, both models being equi-expressive for generating infinite trees. Our main result is to establish the decidability of such games and to provide an effective representation of the winning region as well as of a winning strategy. Thus, the results obtained here provide all necessary tools for an in-depth study of logical properties of trees generated by collapsible pushdown automata/recursion schemes.
We present a survey of the saturation method for model-checking pushdown systems.