Automaton-based Characterisations of First Order Logic over Infinite Trees
Abstract
We study the expressive power of First-Order Logic (\FO) over (unordered) infinite trees, with the aim of identifying robust characterisations in terms of branching-time specification formalisms. While such correspondences are well understood in the linear-time setting, the branching-time case presents well-known structural challenges. To this end, we introduce two classes of hesitant tree automata and show that they capture precisely the expressive power of two branching-time temporal logics, namely \PolPCTL and \CTLsf, both of which have been previously shown to be equivalent to \FO over infinite trees. These results provide uniform automata-theoretic characterisations and yield a natural normal form for the latter in terms of a new fragment of \CTLs called \PolCTLs. As a consequence, we identify a fundamental limitation of \FO in this setting: along each branch, it can express only properties that are either safety or co-safety, thereby revealing a sharp expressive boundary for first-order definability over infinite trees.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.26364,
title = {Automaton-based Characterisations of First Order Logic over Infinite Trees},
author = {Massimo Benerecetti and Dario Della Monica and Angelo Matteo and Fabio Mogavero and Gabriele Puppis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.26364},
year = {2026}
}