Automata Learning -- Expect Delays!

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Dengler, Gabriel, Apel, Sven, Hermanns, Holger
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Dengler, Gabriel
Apel, Sven
Hermanns, Holger
author_facet Dengler, Gabriel
Apel, Sven
Hermanns, Holger
contents This paper studies active automata learning (AAL) in the presence of stochastic delays. We consider Mealy machines that have stochastic delays associated with each transition and explore how the learner can efficiently arrive at faithful estimates of those machines, the precision of which crucially relies on repetitive sampling of transition delays. While it is possible to naïvely integrate the delay sampling into AAL algorithms such as $L^*$, this leads to considerable oversampling near the root of the state space. We address this problem by separating conceptually the learning of behavior and delays such that the learner uses the information gained while learning the logical behavior to arrive at efficient input sequences for collecting the needed delay samples. We put emphasis on treating cases in which identical input/output behaviors might stem from distinct delay characteristics. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that our method outperforms the naïve baseline across a wide range of benchmarks and investigate its applicability in a realistic setting by studying the join order in a relational database.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automata Learning -- Expect Delays!
Dengler, Gabriel
Apel, Sven
Hermanns, Holger
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Software Engineering
This paper studies active automata learning (AAL) in the presence of stochastic delays. We consider Mealy machines that have stochastic delays associated with each transition and explore how the learner can efficiently arrive at faithful estimates of those machines, the precision of which crucially relies on repetitive sampling of transition delays. While it is possible to naïvely integrate the delay sampling into AAL algorithms such as $L^*$, this leads to considerable oversampling near the root of the state space. We address this problem by separating conceptually the learning of behavior and delays such that the learner uses the information gained while learning the logical behavior to arrive at efficient input sequences for collecting the needed delay samples. We put emphasis on treating cases in which identical input/output behaviors might stem from distinct delay characteristics. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that our method outperforms the naïve baseline across a wide range of benchmarks and investigate its applicability in a realistic setting by studying the join order in a relational database.
title Automata Learning -- Expect Delays!
topic Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16384