English

Decidable (Ac)counting with Parikh and Muller: Adding Presburger Arithmetic to Monadic Second-Order Logic over Tree-Interpretable Structures

Logic in Computer Science 2023-11-27 v2 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

We propose ω\omegaMSO\JoinBAPA, an expressive logic for describing countable structures, which subsumes and transcends both Counting Monadic Second-Order Logic (CMSO) and Boolean Algebra with Presburger Arithmetic (BAPA). We show that satisfiability of ω\omegaMSO\JoinBAPA is decidable over the class of labeled infinite binary trees, whereas it becomes undecidable even for a rather mild relaxations. The decidability result is established by an elaborate multi-step transformation into a particular normal form, followed by the deployment of Parikh-Muller Tree Automata, a novel kind of automaton for infinite labeled binary trees, integrating and generalizing both Muller and Parikh automata while still exhibiting a decidable (in fact PSpace-complete) emptiness problem. By means of MSO-interpretations, we lift the decidability result to all tree-interpretable classes of structures, including the classes of finite/countable structures of bounded treewidth/cliquewidth/partitionwidth. We generalize the result further by showing that decidability is even preserved when coupling width-restricted ω\omegaMSO\JoinBAPA with width-unrestricted two-variable logic with advanced counting. A final showcase demonstrates how our results can be leveraged to harvest decidability results for expressive μ\mu-calculi extended by global Presburger constraints.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.01962,
  title  = {Decidable (Ac)counting with Parikh and Muller: Adding Presburger Arithmetic to Monadic Second-Order Logic over Tree-Interpretable Structures},
  author = {Luisa Herrmann and Vincent Peth and Sebastian Rudolph},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.01962},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

extended version, accepted at CSL 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:24:18.794Z