#CFG and #DNNF admit FPRAS
Abstract
We provide the first fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for the following two counting problems: 1. Given a Context Free Grammar over alphabet , count the number of words of length exactly generated by . 2. Given a circuit in Decomposable Negation Normal Form (DNNF) over the set of Boolean variables , compute the number of assignments to such that evaluates to 1. Finding polynomial time algorithms for the aforementioned problems has been a longstanding open problem. Prior work could either only obtain a quasi-polynomial runtime (SODA 1995) or a polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for restricted fragments, such as non-deterministic finite automata (JACM 2021) or non-deterministic tree automata (STOC 2021).
Cite
@article{arxiv.2406.18224,
title = {#CFG and #DNNF admit FPRAS},
author = {Kuldeep S. Meel and Alexis de Colnet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.18224},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Full version of the paper published at SODA 2026