English

Why Does Propositional Quantification Make Modal and Temporal Logics on Trees Robustly Hard?

Logic in Computer Science 2023-06-22 v6

Abstract

Adding propositional quantification to the modal logics K, T or S4 is known to lead to undecidability but CTL with propositional quantification under the tree semantics (tQCTL) admits a non-elementary Tower-complete satisfiability problem. We investigate the complexity of strict fragments of tQCTL as well as of the modal logic K with propositional quantification under the tree semantics. More specifically, we show that tQCTL restricted to the temporal operator EX is already Tower-hard, which is unexpected as EX can only enforce local properties. When tQCTL restricted to EX is interpreted on N-bounded trees for some N >= 2, we prove that the satisfiability problem is AExpPol-complete; AExpPol-hardness is established by reduction from a recently introduced tiling problem, instrumental for studying the model-checking problem for interval temporal logics. As consequences of our proof method, we prove Tower-hardness of tQCTL restricted to EF or to EXEF and of the well-known modal logics such as K, KD, GL, K4 and S4 with propositional quantification under a semantics based on classes of trees.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.13122,
  title  = {Why Does Propositional Quantification Make Modal and Temporal Logics on Trees Robustly Hard?},
  author = {Bartosz Bednarczyk and Stéphane Demri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.13122},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:33:30.812Z