A No-go Theorem for Coalgebraic Product Construction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kori, Mayuko, Watanabe, Kazuki
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kori, Mayuko
Watanabe, Kazuki
author_facet Kori, Mayuko
Watanabe, Kazuki
contents Verifying traces of systems is a central topic in formal verification. We study model checking of Markov chains (MCs) against temporal properties represented as (finite) automata. For instance, given an MC and a deterministic finite automaton (DFA), a simple but practically useful model checking problem asks for the probability of (terminating) traces accepted by the DFA, which can be computed via a product MC of the given MC and DFA and reduced to a simple reachability problem. Recently, Watanabe, Junges, Rot, and Hasuo proposed coalgebraic product constructions, a categorical framework that uniformly explains such coalgebraic constructions using distributive laws. This framework covers a range of instances, including the model checking of MCs against DFAs. In this paper, on top of their framework we first present a no-go theorem for product constructions, showing a case when we cannot do product constructions for model checking. Specifically, we show that there are no coalgebraic product MCs of MCs and nondeterministic finite automata for computing the probability of the accepting traces. The proof relies on a characterisation of natural transformations between certain functors that determine the type of branching, including nondeterministic or probabilistic branching. Second, we present a coalgebraic product construction of MCs and multiset finite automata (MFAs) as a new instance within our framework. This construction addresses a model checking problem that asks for the expected number of accepting runs on MFAs over traces of MCs. We show that this problem is solvable in polynomial time.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06592
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A No-go Theorem for Coalgebraic Product Construction
Kori, Mayuko
Watanabe, Kazuki
Logic in Computer Science
Verifying traces of systems is a central topic in formal verification. We study model checking of Markov chains (MCs) against temporal properties represented as (finite) automata. For instance, given an MC and a deterministic finite automaton (DFA), a simple but practically useful model checking problem asks for the probability of (terminating) traces accepted by the DFA, which can be computed via a product MC of the given MC and DFA and reduced to a simple reachability problem. Recently, Watanabe, Junges, Rot, and Hasuo proposed coalgebraic product constructions, a categorical framework that uniformly explains such coalgebraic constructions using distributive laws. This framework covers a range of instances, including the model checking of MCs against DFAs. In this paper, on top of their framework we first present a no-go theorem for product constructions, showing a case when we cannot do product constructions for model checking. Specifically, we show that there are no coalgebraic product MCs of MCs and nondeterministic finite automata for computing the probability of the accepting traces. The proof relies on a characterisation of natural transformations between certain functors that determine the type of branching, including nondeterministic or probabilistic branching. Second, we present a coalgebraic product construction of MCs and multiset finite automata (MFAs) as a new instance within our framework. This construction addresses a model checking problem that asks for the expected number of accepting runs on MFAs over traces of MCs. We show that this problem is solvable in polynomial time.
title A No-go Theorem for Coalgebraic Product Construction
topic Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06592