Related papers: Profinite Techniques for Probabilistic Automata an…
We study alternating good-for-games (GFG) automata, i.e., alternating automata where both conjunctive and disjunctive choices can be resolved in an online manner, without knowledge of the suffix of the input word still to be read. We show…
Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…
This paper studies the complexity of languages of finite words using automata theory. To go beyond the class of regular languages, we consider infinite automata and the notion of state complexity defined by Karp. Motivated by the seminal…
When does a deterministic computational model define a probability distribution? What are its properties? This work formalises and settles this stochasticity problem for weighted automata, and its generalisation cost register automata…
We consider the problem of computing the value and an optimal strategy for minimizing the expected termination time in one-counter Markov decision processes. Since the value may be irrational and an optimal strategy may be rather…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…
The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…
Nonuniform Deterministic Finite Automata (NUDFA) over monoids were invented by Barrington to study boundaries of nonuniform constant-memory computation. Later, results on these automata helped to indentify interesting classes of groups for…
The minimal deterministic finite automaton is generally used to determine regular languages equality. Antimirov and Mosses proposed a rewrite system for deciding regular expressions equivalence of which Almeida et al. presented an improved…
An inductive theorem proving method for constrained term rewriting systems, which is based on rewriting induction, needs a decision procedure for reduction-completeness of constrained terms. In addition, the sufficient complete property of…
We introduce a measure called width, quantifying the amount of nondeterminism in automata. Width generalises the notion of good-for-games (GFG) automata, that correspond to NFAs of width 1, and where an accepting run can be built on-the-fly…
This paper discusses algorithms for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) that have monotone optimal policies. We propose a two-stage alternating convex optimization scheme that can accelerate the search for an optimal policy by…
Stochastic automata are a formal compositional model for concurrent stochastic timed systems, with general distributions and non-deterministic choices. Measures of interest are defined over schedulers that resolve the nondeterminism. In…
This article presents a constrained policy optimization approach for the optimal control of systems under nonstationary uncertainties. We introduce an assumption that we call Markov embeddability that allows us to cast the stochastic…
In this work we use a framework of finite-state automata constructions based on equivalences over words to provide new insights on the relation between well-known methods for computing the minimal deterministic automaton of a language.
Probabilistic pushdown automata (pPDA) are a standard model for discrete probabilistic programs with procedures and recursion. In pPDA, many quantitative properties are characterized as least fixpoints of polynomial equation systems. In…
While many applications of automata in formal methods can use nondeterministic automata, some applications, most notably synthesis, need deterministic or good-for-games (GFG) automata. The latter are nondeterministic automata that can…
A large part of modern machine learning theory often involves computing the high-dimensional expected trace of a rational expression of large rectangular random matrices. To symbolically compute such quantities using free probability…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…