Selected Papers of the 10th Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science (CALCO 2023)

Editors: Paolo Baldan, Valeria De Paiva


1. Many-valued coalgebraic logic over semi-primal varieties

Alexander Kurz ; Wolfgang Poiger ; Bruno Teheux.
We study many-valued coalgebraic logics with semi-primal algebras of truth-degrees. We provide a systematic way to lift endofunctors defined on the variety of Boolean algebras to endofunctors on the variety generated by a semi-primal algebra. We show that this can be extended to a technique to lift classical coalgebraic logics to many-valued ones, and that (one-step) completeness and expressivity are preserved under this lifting. For specific classes of endofunctors, we also describe how to obtain an axiomatization of the lifted many-valued logic directly from an axiomatization of the original classical one. In particular, we apply all of these techniques to classical modal logic.

2. Rewriting for Symmetric Monoidal Categories with Commutative (Co)Monoid Structure

Aleksandar Milosavljevic ; Robin Piedeleu ; Fabio Zanasi.
String diagrams are pictorial representations for morphisms of symmetric monoidal categories. They constitute an intuitive and expressive graphical syntax, which has found application in a very diverse range of fields including concurrency theory, quantum computing, control theory, machine learning, linguistics, and digital circuits. Rewriting theory for string diagrams relies on a combinatorial interpretation as double-pushout rewriting of certain hypergraphs. As previously studied, there is a `tension' in this interpretation: in order to make it sound and complete, we either need to add structure on string diagrams (in particular, Frobenius algebra structure) or pose restrictions on double-pushout rewriting (resulting in 'convex' rewriting). From the string diagram viewpoint, imposing a full Frobenius structure may not always be natural or desirable in applications, which motivates our study of a weaker requirement: commutative monoid structure. In this work we characterise string diagram rewriting modulo commutative monoid equations, via a sound and complete interpretation in a suitable notion of double-pushout rewriting of hypergraphs.

3. Fractals from Regular Behaviours

Todd Schmid ; Victoria Noquez ; Lawrence S. Moss.
We forge connections between the theory of fractal sets obtained as attractors of iterated function systems and process calculi. To this end, we reinterpret Milner's expressions for processes as contraction operators on a complete metric space. When the space is, for example, the plane, the denotations of fixed point terms correspond to familiar fractal sets. We give a sound and complete axiomatization of fractal equivalence, the congruence on terms consisting of pairs that construct identical self-similar sets in all interpretations. We further make connections to labelled Markov chains and to invariant measures. In all of this work, we use important results from process calculi. For example, we use Rabinovich's completeness theorem for trace equivalence in our own completeness theorem. In addition to our results, we also raise many questions related to both fractals and process calculi.

4. A Categorical Treatment of Open Linear Systems

Dario Stein ; Richard Samuelson.
An open stochastic system à la Jan Willems is a system affected by two qualitatively different kinds of uncertainty: one is probabilistic fluctuation, and the other one is nondeterminism caused by a fundamental lack of information. We present a formalization of open stochastic systems in the language of category theory. Central to this is the notion of copartiality which models how the lack of information propagates through a system (corresponding to the coarseness of sigma-algebras in Willems' work). As a concrete example, we study extended Gaussian distributions, which combine Gaussian probability with nondeterminism and correspond precisely to Willems' notion of Gaussian linear systems. We describe them both as measure-theoretic and abstract categorical entities, which enables us to rigorously describe a variety of phenomena like noisy physical laws and uninformative priors in Bayesian statistics. The category of extended Gaussian maps can be seen as a mutual generalization of Gaussian probability and linear relations, which connects the literature on categorical probability with ideas from control theory like signal-flow diagrams.

5. Aczel-Mendler Bisimulations in a Regular Category

Jeremy Dubut.
Aczel-Mendler bisimulations are a coalgebraic extension of a variety of computational relations between systems. It is usual to assume that the underlying category satisfies some form of the axiom of choice, so that the collection of bisimulations enjoys desirable properties, such as closure under composition. In this paper, we accommodate the definition in general regular categories and toposes. We show that this general definition: 1) is closed under composition without using the axiom of choice, 2) coincides with other types of coalgebraic formulations under milder conditions, 3) coincides with the usual definition when the category satisfies the regular axiom of choice. In particular, the case of toposes heavily relies on power-objects, for which we recover some favourable properties along the way. Finally, we describe several examples in Stone spaces, toposes for name-passing, and modules over a ring.