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Hereditarily finite (HF) set theory provides a standard universe of sets, but with no infinite sets. Its utility is demonstrated through a formalisation of the theory of regular languages and finite automata, including the Myhill-Nerode…
This paper studies the complexity of operations on finite automata and the complexity of their decision problems when the alphabet is unary. Let $n$ denote the maximum of the number of states of the input finite automata considered in the…
We consider the problem of minimising the number of states in a multiplicity tree automaton over the field of rational numbers. We give a minimisation algorithm that runs in polynomial time assuming unit-cost arithmetic. We also show that a…
We compute the exact maximum state complexity for the language consisting of $m$ words of length $N$, and characterize languages achieving the maximum. We also consider a special case, namely languages $C(w)$ consisting of the conjugates of…
In this paper, we present a toolbox for a specific optimization problem that frequently arises in bioinformatics or genomics. In this specific optimisation problem, the state space is a set of words of specified length over a finite…
A two-dimensional finite automaton has a read-only input head that moves in four directions on a finite array of cells labelled by symbols of the input alphabet. A three-way two-dimensional automaton is prohibited from making upward moves,…
In coding and information theory, it is desirable to construct maximal codes that can be either variable length codes or error control codes of fixed length. However deciding code maximality boils down to deciding whether a given NFA is…
Let $G=(V,E)$ be a graph. Let $w$ be a positive integer. A $w$-dominating set is a vertex subset $S$ such that for all $v\in V$, either $v\in S$ or it has at least $w$ neighbors in $S$. The $w$-Dominating Set problem is to find the minimum…
Traditionally, finite automata theory has been used as a framework for the representation of possibly infinite sets of strings. In this work, we introduce the notion of second-order finite automata, a formalism that combines finite automata…
While finite automata have minimal DFAs as a simple and natural normal form, deterministic omega-automata do not currently have anything similar. One reason for this is that a normal form for omega-regular languages has to speak about more…
We consider finite deterministic automata such that their alphabets consist of exactly one letter of defect 1 and a set of permutations of the state set. We study under which conditions such an automaton is completely reachable. We focus…
We consider Parikh images of languages accepted by non-deterministic finite automata and context-free grammars; in other words, we treat the languages in a commutative way --- we do not care about the order of letters in the accepted word,…
It is undecidable whether the language recognized by a probabilistic finite automaton is empty. Several other undecidability results, in particular regarding problems about matrix products, are based on this important theorem. We present…
The word problem for discrete groups is well-known to be undecidable by a Turing Machine; more precisely, it is reducible both to and from and thus equivalent to the discrete Halting Problem. The present work introduces and studies a real…
Automatic image matting (AIM) refers to estimating the soft foreground from an arbitrary natural image without any auxiliary input like trimap, which is useful for image editing. Prior methods try to learn semantic features to aid the…
This thesis investigates the central role of homomorphism problems (structure-preserving maps) in two complementary domains: database querying over finite, graph-shaped data, and constraint solving over (potentially infinite) structures.…
Automatically generating natural language descriptions from an image is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence that requires a good understanding of the visual and textual signals and the correlations between them. The…
We study the satisfiability problem of symbolic finite automata and decompose it into the satisfiability problem of the theory of the input characters and the monadic second-order theory of the indices of accepted words. We use our…
Limit-average automata are weighted automata on infinite words that use average to aggregate the weights seen in infinite runs. We study approximate learning problems for limit-average automata in two settings: passive and active. In the…
We prove that for any distinct $x,y \in \{0,1\}^n$, there is a deterministic finite automaton with $\widetilde{O}(n^{1/3})$ states that accepts $x$ but not $y$. This improves Robson's 1989 upper bound of $\widetilde{O}(n^{2/5})$.