English

Convex Language Semantics for Nondeterministic Probabilistic Automata

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2018-05-30 v1 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

We explore language semantics for automata combining probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We first show that there are precisely two natural semantics for probabilistic automata with nondeterminism. For both choices, we show that these automata are strictly more expressive than deterministic probabilistic automata, and we prove that the problem of checking language equivalence is undecidable by reduction from the threshold problem. However, we provide a discounted metric that can be computed to arbitrarily high precision.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.11550,
  title  = {Convex Language Semantics for Nondeterministic Probabilistic Automata},
  author = {Gerco van Heerdt and Justin Hsu and Joël Ouaknine and Alexandra Silva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.11550},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:12:12.770Z