Jan-Christoph Kassing ; Jürgen Giesl - From Innermost to Full Probabilistic Term Rewriting: Almost-Sure Termination, Complexity, and Modularity

lmcs:14352 - Logical Methods in Computer Science, December 12, 2025, Volume 21, Issue 4 - https://doi.org/10.46298/lmcs-21(4:28)2025
From Innermost to Full Probabilistic Term Rewriting: Almost-Sure Termination, Complexity, and ModularityArticle

Authors: Jan-Christoph Kassing ; Jürgen Giesl

    There are many evaluation strategies for term rewrite systems, but automatically proving termination or analyzing complexity is usually easiest for innermost rewriting. Several syntactic criteria exist when innermost termination implies (full) termination or when runtime complexity and innermost runtime complexity coincide. We adapt these criteria to the probabilistic setting, e.g., we show when it suffices to analyze almost-sure termination w.r.t. innermost rewriting in order to prove (full) almost-sure termination of probabilistic term rewrite systems. These criteria can be applied for both termination and complexity analysis in the probabilistic setting. We implemented and evaluated our new contributions in the tool AProVE. Moreover, we also use our new results to investigate the modularity of probabilistic termination properties.


    Volume: Volume 21, Issue 4
    Published on: December 12, 2025
    Accepted on: August 18, 2025
    Submitted on: September 27, 2024
    Keywords: Logic in Computer Science