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We study a variant of the classical membership problem in automata theory, which consists of deciding whether a given input word is accepted by a given automaton. We do so through the lenses of parameterized dynamic data structures: we assume that the automaton is fixed and its size is the parameter, while the input word is revealed as in a stream, one symbol at a time following the natural order on positions. The goal is to design a dynamic data structure that can be efficiently updated upon revealing the next symbol, while maintaining the answer to the query on whether the word consisting of symbols revealed so far is accepted by the automaton. We provide complexity bounds for this dynamic acceptance problem for timed automata that process symbols interleaved with time spans. The main contribution is a dynamic data structure that maintains acceptance of a fixed one-clock timed automaton A with amortized update time 2 O (| A |) per input symbol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Cost register automata (CRA) and its subclass, copyless CRA, were recently proposed by Alur et al. as a new model for computing functions over strings. We study some structural properties, expressiveness, and closure properties of copyless CRA. We show that copyless CRA are strictly less expressive than weighted automata and are not closed under reverse operation. To find a better class we impose restrictions on copyless CRA, which ends successfully with a new robust computational model that is closed under reverse and other extensions. Highlights • A recently proposed model for computing functions copyless CRA is studied. • It is shown that copyless CRA are not closed under reverse. • A restricted variant bounded alternation CRA (BAC) is proposed. • BAC is shown to be closed under reverse and other extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Containment of monadic datalog programs over trees is decidable. The situation is more complex when tree nodes carry labels from an infinite alphabet that can be tested for equality. It then matters whether the descendant relation is allowed or not: the descendant relation can be eliminated easily from monadic programs only when label equalities are not used. With descendant, even containment of linear monadic programs in unions of conjunctive queries is undecidable, and positive results are known only for boundeddepth trees. We show that without descendant, containment of connected monadic programs is decidable over ranked trees, but over unranked trees it is so only for linear programs. With descendant, it becomes decidable over unranked trees under restriction to downward programs: each rule only moves down from the node in the head. This restriction is motivated by regular tree pattern queries, a recent formalism in the area of ActiveXML, which we show to be equivalent to linear downward programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the expressive power of polynomial recursive sequences, a nonlinear extension of the well-known class of linear recursive sequences. These sequences arise naturally in the study of nonlinear extensions of weighted automata, where (non)expressiveness results translate to class separations. A typical example of a polynomial recursive sequence is bn = n!. Our main result is that the sequence un = nn is not polynomial recursive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider one of the weakest variants of cost register automata over a tropical semiring, namely copyless cost register automata over ℕ with updates using min and increments. We show that this model can simulate, in some sense, the runs of counter machines with zero-tests. We deduce that a number of problems pertaining to that model are undecidable, namely equivalence, upperboundedness, and semilinearity. In particular, the undecidability of equivalence disproves a conjecture of Alur et al. from 2012. To emphasize how weak these machines are, we also show that they can be expressed as a restricted form of linearly-ambiguous weighted automata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emptiness and containment problems for probabilistic automata are natural quantitative generalisations of the classical language emptiness and inclusion problems for Boolean automata. It is known that both problems are undecidable. We provide a more refined view of these problems in terms of the degree of ambiguity of probabilistic automata. We show that a gap version of the emptiness problem (known to be undecidable in general) becomes decidable for automata of polynomial ambiguity. We complement this positive result by showing that emptiness remains undecidable when restricted to automata of linear ambiguity. We then turn to finitely ambiguous automata and give a conditional decidability proof for containment in case one of the automata is assumed to be unambiguous. Part of our proof relies on the decidability of the theory of real exponentiation, proved, subject to Schanuel's Conjecture, by Macintyre and Wilkie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a subclass of linear recurrence sequences which we call poly-rational sequences because they are denoted by rational expressions closed under sum and product. We show that this class is robust by giving several characterisations: polynomially ambiguous weighted automata, copyless cost-register automata, rational formal series, and linear recurrence sequences whose eigenvalues are roots of rational numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]