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Selected Papers of the Thirty-Third Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2018)
Editors: Anuj Dawar, Erich Grädel
1. Concurrency and Probability: Removing Confusion, Compositionally
Assigning a satisfactory truly concurrent semantics to Petri nets with confusion and distributed decisions is a long standing problem, especially if one wants to resolve decisions by drawing from some probability distribution. Here we propose a general solution based on a recursive, static decomposition of (occurrence) nets in loci of decision, called structural branching cells (s-cells). Each s-cell exposes a set of alternatives, called transactions. Our solution transforms a given Petri net into another net whose transitions are the transactions of the s-cells and whose places are those of the original net, with some auxiliary structure for bookkeeping. The resulting net is confusion-free, and thus conflicting alternatives can be equipped with probabilistic choices, while nonintersecting alternatives are purely concurrent and their probability distributions are independent. The validity of the construction is witnessed by a tight correspondence with the recursively stopped configurations of Abbes and Benveniste. Some advantages of our approach are that: i) s-cells are defined statically and locally in a compositional way; ii) our resulting nets faithfully account for concurrency.
2. Probabilistic logics based on Riesz spaces
We introduce a novel real-valued endogenous logic for expressing properties of probabilistic transition systems called Riesz modal logic. The design of the syntax and semantics of this logic is directly inspired by the theory of Riesz spaces, a mature field of mathematics at the intersection of universal algebra and functional analysis. By using powerful results from this theory, we develop the duality theory of the Riesz modal logic in the form of an algebra-to-coalgebra correspondence. This has a number of consequences including: a sound and complete axiomatization, the proof that the logic characterizes probabilistic bisimulation and other convenient results such as completion theorems. This work is intended to be the basis for subsequent research on extensions of Riesz modal logic with fixed-point operators.
3. Register Games
The complexity of parity games is a long standing open problem that saw a major breakthrough in 2017 when two quasi-polynomial algorithms were published. This article presents a third, independent approach to solving parity games in quasi-polynomial time, based on the notion of register game, a parameterised variant of a parity game. The analysis of register games leads to a quasi-polynomial algorithm for parity games, a polynomial algorithm for restricted classes of parity games and a novel measure of complexity, the register index, which aims to capture the combined complexity of the priority assignement and the underlying game graph. We further present a translation of alternating parity word automata into alternating weak automata with only a quasi-polynomial increase in size, based on register games; this improves on the previous exponential translation. We also use register games to investigate the parity index hierarchy: while for words the index hierarchy of alternating parity automata collapses to the weak level, and for trees it is strict, for structures between trees and words, it collapses logarithmically, in the sense that any parity tree automaton of size n is equivalent, on these particular classes of structures, to an automaton with a number of priorities logarithmic in n.
4. Cellular Cohomology in Homotopy Type Theory
We present a development of cellular cohomology in homotopy type theory. Cohomology associates to each space a sequence of abelian groups capturing part of its structure, and has the advantage over homotopy groups in that these abelian groups of many common spaces are easier to compute. Cellular cohomology is a special kind of cohomology designed for cell complexes: these are built in stages by attaching spheres of progressively higher dimension, and cellular cohomology defines the groups out of the combinatorial description of how spheres are attached. Our main result is that for finite cell complexes, a wide class of cohomology theories (including the ones defined through Eilenberg-MacLane spaces) can be calculated via cellular cohomology. This result was formalized in the Agda proof assistant.
5. Completeness of the ZX-Calculus
The ZX-Calculus is a graphical language for diagrammatic reasoning in quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. It comes equipped with an equational presentation. We focus here on a very important property of the language: completeness, which roughly ensures the equational theory captures all of quantum mechanics. We first improve on the known-to-be-complete presentation for the so-called Clifford fragment of the language - a restriction that is not universal - by adding some axioms. Thanks to a system of back-and-forth translation between the ZX-Calculus and a third-party complete graphical language, we prove that the provided axiomatisation is complete for the first approximately universal fragment of the language, namely Clifford+T. We then prove that the expressive power of this presentation, though aimed at achieving completeness for the aforementioned restriction, extends beyond Clifford+T, to a class of diagrams that we call linear with Clifford+T constants. We use another version of the third-party language - and an adapted system of back-and-forth translation - to complete the language for the ZX-Calculus as a whole, that is, with no restriction. We briefly discuss the added axioms, and finally, we provide a complete axiomatisation for an altered version of the language which involves an additional generator, making the presentation simpler.
6. Definable decompositions for graphs of bounded linear cliquewidth
We prove that for every positive integer k, there exists an MSO_1-transduction that given a graph of linear cliquewidth at most k outputs, nondeterministically, some cliquewidth decomposition of the graph of width bounded by a function of k. A direct corollary of this result is the equivalence of the notions of CMSO_1-definability and recognizability on graphs of bounded linear cliquewidth.
7. Sequential Relational Decomposition
The concept of decomposition in computer science and engineering is considered a fundamental component of computational thinking and is prevalent in design of algorithms, software construction, hardware design, and more. We propose a simple and natural formalization of sequential decomposition, in which a task is decomposed into two sequential sub-tasks, with the first sub-task to be executed before the second sub-task is executed. These tasks are specified by means of input/output relations. We define and study decomposition problems, which is to decide whether a given specification can be sequentially decomposed. Our main result is that decomposition itself is a difficult computational problem. More specifically, we study decomposition problems in three settings: where the input task is specified explicitly, by means of Boolean circuits, and by means of automatic relations. We show that in the first setting decomposition is NP-complete, in the second setting it is NEXPTIME-complete, and in the third setting there is evidence to suggest that it is undecidable. Our results indicate that the intuitive idea of decomposition as a system-design approach requires further investigation. In particular, we show that adding a human to the loop by asking for a decomposition hint lowers the complexity of decomposition problems considerably.