Partial Reductions for Kleene Algebra with Linear Hypotheses

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chung, Liam, Kappé, Tobias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chung, Liam
Kappé, Tobias
author_facet Chung, Liam
Kappé, Tobias
contents Kleene algebra (KA) is an important tool for reasoning about general program equivalences, with a decidable and complete equational theory. However, KA cannot always prove equivalences between specific programs. For this purpose, one adds hypotheses to KA that encode program-specific knowledge. Traditionally, a map on regular expressions called a reduction then lets us lift decidability and completeness to these more expressive systems. Explicitly constructing such a reduction requires significant labour. Moreover, due to regularity constraints, a reduction may not exist for all combinations of expression and hypothesis. We describe an automaton-based construction to mechanically derive reductions for a wide class of hypotheses. These reductions can be partial, in which case they yield partial completeness: completeness for expressions in their domain. This allows us to automatically establish the provability of more equivalences than what is covered in existing work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_14114
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Partial Reductions for Kleene Algebra with Linear Hypotheses
Chung, Liam
Kappé, Tobias
Programming Languages
Kleene algebra (KA) is an important tool for reasoning about general program equivalences, with a decidable and complete equational theory. However, KA cannot always prove equivalences between specific programs. For this purpose, one adds hypotheses to KA that encode program-specific knowledge. Traditionally, a map on regular expressions called a reduction then lets us lift decidability and completeness to these more expressive systems. Explicitly constructing such a reduction requires significant labour. Moreover, due to regularity constraints, a reduction may not exist for all combinations of expression and hypothesis. We describe an automaton-based construction to mechanically derive reductions for a wide class of hypotheses. These reductions can be partial, in which case they yield partial completeness: completeness for expressions in their domain. This allows us to automatically establish the provability of more equivalences than what is covered in existing work.
title Partial Reductions for Kleene Algebra with Linear Hypotheses
topic Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14114