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Volume 19, Issue 3
2023
1. Computing with Infinite Objects: the Gray Code Case
Infinite Gray code has been introduced by Tsuiki as a redundancy-free representation of the reals. In applications the signed digit representation is mostly used which has maximal redundancy. Tsuiki presented a functional program converting signed digit code into infinite Gray code. Moreover, he showed that infinite Gray code can effectively be converted into signed digit code, but the program needs to have some non-deterministic features (see also H. Tsuiki, K. Sugihara, "Streams with a bottom in functional languages"). Berger and Tsuiki reproved the result in a system of formal first-order intuitionistic logic extended by inductive and co-inductive definitions, as well as some new logical connectives capturing concurrent behaviour. The programs extracted from the proofs are exactly the ones given by Tsuiki. In order to do so, co-inductive predicates $\bS$ and $\bG$ are defined and the inclusion $\bS \subseteq \bG$ is derived. For the converse inclusion the new logical connectives are used to introduce a concurrent version $\S_{2}$ of $S$ and $\bG \subseteq \bS_{2}$ is shown. What one is looking for, however, is an equivalence proof of the involved concepts. One of the main aims of the present paper is to close the gap. A concurrent version $\bG^{*}$ of $\bG$ and a modification $\bS^{*}$ of $\bS_{2}$ are presented such that $\bS^{*} = \bG^{*}$. A crucial tool in U. Berger, H. Tsuiki, "Intuitionistic fixed point logic" is a formulation of the Archimedean […]
2. A framework to measure the robustness of programs in the unpredictable environment
Due to the diffusion of IoT, modern software systems are often thought to control and coordinate smart devices in order to manage assets and resources, and to guarantee efficient behaviours. For this class of systems, which interact extensively with humans and with their environment, it is thus crucial to guarantee their correct behaviour in order to avoid unexpected and possibly dangerous situations. In this paper we will present a framework that allows us to measure the robustness of systems. This is the ability of a program to tolerate changes in the environmental conditions and preserving the original behaviour. In the proposed framework, the interaction of a program with its environment is represented as a sequence of random variables describing how both evolve in time. For this reason, the considered measures will be defined among probability distributions of observed data. The proposed framework will be then used to define the notions of adaptability and reliability. The former indicates the ability of a program to absorb perturbation on environmental conditions after a given amount of time. The latter expresses the ability of a program to maintain its intended behaviour (up-to some reasonable tolerance) despite the presence of perturbations in the environment. Moreover, an algorithm, based on statistical inference, is proposed to evaluate the proposed metric and the aforementioned properties. We use two case studies to the describe and evaluate the proposed approach.
3. Separating Sessions Smoothly
This paper introduces Hypersequent GV (HGV), a modular and extensible core calculus for functional programming with session types that enjoys deadlock freedom, confluence, and strong normalisation. HGV exploits hyper-environments, which are collections of type environments, to ensure that structural congruence is type preserving. As a consequence we obtain an operational correspondence between HGV and HCP -- a process calculus based on hypersequents and in a propositions-as-types correspondence with classical linear logic (CLL). Our translations from HGV to HCP and vice-versa both preserve and reflect reduction. HGV scales smoothly to support Girard's Mix rule, a crucial ingredient for channel forwarding and exceptions.
4. On Presburger arithmetic extended with non-unary counting quantifiers
We consider a first-order logic for the integers with addition. This logic extends classical first-order logic by modulo-counting, threshold-counting and exact-counting quantifiers, all applied to tuples of variables (here, residues are given as terms while moduli and thresholds are given explicitly). Our main result shows that satisfaction for this logic is decidable in two-fold exponential space. If only threshold- and exact-counting quantifiers are allowed, we prove an upper bound of alternating two-fold exponential time with linearly many alternations. This latter result almost matches Berman's exact complexity of first-order logic without counting quantifiers. To obtain these results, we first translate threshold- and exact-counting quantifiers into classical first-order logic in polynomial time (which already proves the second result). To handle the remaining modulo-counting quantifiers for tuples, we first reduce them in doubly exponential time to modulo-counting quantifiers for single elements. For these quantifiers, we provide a quantifier elimination procedure similar to Reddy and Loveland's procedure for first-order logic and analyse the growth of coefficients, constants, and moduli appearing in this process. The bounds obtained this way allow to restrict quantification in the original formula to integers of bounded size which then implies the first result mentioned above. Our logic is incomparable with the logic considered by Chistikov et al. in […]
5. Reduction Free Normalisation for a proof irrelevant type of propositions
We show normalisation and decidability of convertibility for a type theory with a hierarchy of universes and a proof irrelevant type of propositions, close to the type system used in the proof assistant Lean. Contrary to previous arguments, the proof does not require explicitly to introduce a notion of neutral and normal forms.
6. Capturing the polynomial hierarchy by second-order revised Krom logic
We study the expressive power and complexity of second-order revised Krom logic (SO-KROM$^{r}$). On ordered finite structures, we show that its existential fragment $\Sigma^1_1$-KROM$^r$ equals $\Sigma^1_1$-KROM, and captures NL. On all finite structures, for $k\geq 1$, we show that $\Sigma^1_{k}$ equals $\Sigma^1_{k+1}$-KROM$^r$ if $k$ is even, and $\Pi^1_{k}$ equals $\Pi^1_{k+1}$-KROM$^r$ if $k$ is odd. The result gives an alternative logic to capture the polynomial hierarchy. We also introduce an extended version of second-order Krom logic (SO-EKROM). On ordered finite structures, we prove that SO-EKROM collapses to $\Pi^{1}_{2}$-EKROM and equals $\Pi^1_1$. Both SO-EKROM and $\Pi^{1}_{2}$-EKROM capture co-NP on ordered finite structures.
7. Positive First-order Logic on Words and Graphs
We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is an FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides a simple proof that Lyndon's preservation theorem fails on finite structures. We lift this example language to finite graphs, thereby providing a new result of independent interest for FO-definable graph classes: negation might be needed even when the class is closed under addition of edges. We finally show that the problem of whether a given regular language of finite words is definable in FO+ is undecidable.
8. A Spatial Logic for Simplicial Models
Collective Adaptive Systems often consist of many heterogeneous components typically organised in groups. These entities interact with each other by adapting their behaviour to pursue individual or collective goals. In these systems, the distribution of these entities determines a space that can be either physical or logical. The former is defined in terms of a physical relation among components. The latter depends on logical relations, such as being part of the same group. In this context, specification and verification of spatial properties play a fundamental role in supporting the design of systems and predicting their behaviour. For this reason, different tools and techniques have been proposed to specify and verify the properties of space, mainly described as graphs. Therefore, the approaches generally use model spatial relations to describe a form of proximity among pairs of entities. Unfortunately, these graph-based models do not permit considering relations among more than two entities that may arise when one is interested in describing aspects of space by involving interactions among groups of entities. In this work, we propose a spatial logic interpreted on simplicial complexes. These are topological objects, able to represent surfaces and volumes efficiently that generalise graphs with higher-order edges. We discuss how the satisfaction of logical formulas can be verified by a correct and complete model checking algorithm, which is linear to the dimension of the […]
9. A Theory of Formal Choreographic Languages
We introduce a meta-model based on formal languages, dubbed formal choreographic languages, to study message-passing systems. Our framework allows us to generalise standard constructions from the literature and to compare them. In particular, we consider notions such as global view, local view, and projections from the former to the latter. The correctness of local views projected from global views is characterised in terms of a closure property. We consider a number of communication properties -- such as (dead)lock-freedom -- and give conditions on formal choreographic languages to guarantee them. Finally, we show how formal choreographic languages can capture existing formalisms; specifically we consider communicating finite-state machines, choreography automata, and multiparty session types. Notably, formal choreographic languages, differently from most approaches in the literature, can naturally model systems exhibiting non-regular behaviour.
10. Continuous Positional Payoffs
What payoffs are positionally determined for deterministic two-player antagonistic games on finite directed graphs? In this paper we study this question for payoffs that are continuous. The main reason why continuous positionally determined payoffs are interesting is that they include the multi-discounted payoffs. We show that for continuous payoffs, positional determinacy is equivalent to a simple property called prefix-monotonicity. We provide three proofs of it, using three major techniques of establishing positional determinacy -- inductive technique, fixed point technique and strategy improvement technique. A combination of these approaches provides us with better understanding of the structure of continuous positionally determined payoffs as well as with some algorithmic results.
11. Trade-offs in Static and Dynamic Evaluation of Hierarchical Queries
We investigate trade-offs in static and dynamic evaluation of hierarchical queries with arbitrary free variables. In the static setting, the trade-off is between the time to partially compute the query result and the delay needed to enumerate its tuples. In the dynamic setting, we additionally consider the time needed to update the query result under single-tuple inserts or deletes to the database. Our approach observes the degree of values in the database and uses different computation and maintenance strategies for high-degree (heavy) and low-degree (light) values. For the latter it partially computes the result, while for the former it computes enough information to allow for on-the-fly enumeration. We define the preprocessing time, the update time, and the enumeration delay as functions of the light/heavy threshold. By appropriately choosing this threshold, our approach recovers a number of prior results when restricted to hierarchical queries. We show that for a restricted class of hierarchical queries, our approach achieves worst-case optimal update time and enumeration delay conditioned on the Online Matrix-Vector Multiplication Conjecture.
12. The Complexity of Aggregates over Extractions by Regular Expressions
Regular expressions with capture variables, also known as regex-formulas, extract relations of spans (intervals identified by their start and end indices) from text. In turn, the class of regular document spanners is the closure of the regex formulas under the Relational Algebra. We investigate the computational complexity of querying text by aggregate functions, such as sum, average, and quantile, on top of regular document spanners. To this end, we formally define aggregate functions over regular document spanners and analyze the computational complexity of exact and approximate computation. More precisely, we show that in a restricted case, all studied aggregate functions can be computed in polynomial time. In general, however, even though exact computation is intractable, some aggregates can still be approximated with fully polynomial-time randomized approximation schemes (FPRAS).
13. A first-order logic characterization of safety and co-safety languages
Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is one of the most popular temporal logics, that comes into play in a variety of branches of computer science. Among the various reasons of its widespread use there are its strong foundational properties: LTL is equivalent to counter-free omega-automata, to star-free omega-regular expressions, and (by Kamp's theorem) to the First-Order Theory of Linear Orders (FO-TLO). Safety and co-safety languages, where a finite prefix suffices to establish whether a word does not belong or belongs to the language, respectively, play a crucial role in lowering the complexity of problems like model checking and reactive synthesis for LTL. SafetyLTL (resp., coSafetyLTL) is a fragment of LTL where only universal (resp., existential) temporal modalities are allowed, that recognises safety (resp., co-safety) languages only. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a fragment of FO-TLO, called SafetyFO, and of its dual coSafetyFO, which are expressively complete with respect to the LTL-definable safety and co-safety languages. We prove that they exactly characterize SafetyLTL and coSafetyLTL, respectively, a result that joins Kamp's theorem, and provides a clearer view of the characterization of (fragments of) LTL in terms of first-order languages. In addition, it gives a direct, compact, and self-contained proof that any safety language definable in LTL is definable in SafetyLTL as well. As a by-product, we obtain some interesting results […]
14. Arboreal Categories: An Axiomatic Theory of Resources
Game comonads provide a categorical syntax-free approach to finite model theory, and their Eilenberg-Moore coalgebras typically encode important combinatorial parameters of structures. In this paper, we develop a framework whereby the essential properties of these categories of coalgebras are captured in a purely axiomatic fashion. To this end, we introduce arboreal categories, which have an intrinsic process structure, allowing dynamic notions such as bisimulation and back-and-forth games, and resource notions such as number of rounds of a game, to be defined. These are related to extensional or "static" structures via arboreal covers, which are resource-indexed comonadic adjunctions. These ideas are developed in a general, axiomatic setting, and applied to relational structures, where the comonadic constructions for pebbling, Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"issé and modal bisimulation games recently introduced by Abramsky et al. are recovered, showing that many of the fundamental notions of finite model theory and descriptive complexity arise from instances of arboreal covers.
15. Monoidal Width
We introduce monoidal width as a measure of complexity for morphisms in monoidal categories. Inspired by well-known structural width measures for graphs, like tree width and rank width, monoidal width is based on a notion of syntactic decomposition: a monoidal decomposition of a morphism is an expression in the language of monoidal categories, where operations are monoidal products and compositions, that specifies this morphism. Monoidal width penalises the composition operation along ``big'' objects, while it encourages the use of monoidal products. We show that, by choosing the correct categorical algebra for decomposing graphs, we can capture tree width and rank width. For matrices, monoidal width is related to the rank. These examples suggest monoidal width as a good measure for structural complexity of processes modelled as morphisms in monoidal categories.
16. Answer Counting under Guarded TGDs
We study the complexity of answer counting for ontology-mediated queries and for querying under constraints, considering conjunctive queries and unions thereof (UCQs) as the query language and guarded TGDs as the ontology and constraint language, respectively. Our main result is a classification according to whether answer counting is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT), W[1]-equivalent, #W[1]-equivalent, #W[2]-hard, or #A[2]-equivalent, lifting a recent classification for UCQs without ontologies and constraints due to Dell et al. The classification pertains to various structural measures, namely treewidth, contract treewidth, starsize, and linked matching number. Our results rest on the assumption that the arity of relation symbols is bounded by a constant and, in the case of ontology-mediated querying, that all symbols from the ontology and query can occur in the data (so-called full data schema). We also study the meta-problems for the mentioned structural measures, that is, to decide whether a given ontology-mediated query or constraint-query specification is equivalent to one for which the structural measure is bounded.