Vertex-minors, monadic second-order logic, and a conjecture by Seese

Formulas of monadic second-order logic can be used to specify graph transductions, i.e., multivalued functions from graphs to graphs. We obtain in this way classes of graph transductions, called monadic second-order definable graph transductions (or more simply definable transductions) that are closed under composition and preserve the two known classes of context-free sets of graphs, namely the class of Hyperedge Replacement (HR) and the class of Vertex Replacement (VR) sets. These two classes can be characterized in terms of definable transductions and recognizable sets of finite trees. These characterizations are independent of the rewriting mechanisms used to define the HR and VR grammars. When restricted to words, the definable transductions are strictly more powerful than the rational transductions with finite image; they do not preserve context-free languages. We also describe the sets of discrete (edgeless) labeled graphs that are the images of HR and VR sets under definable transductions: this gives a version of Parikh's Theorem (i.e., the characterization of the commutative images of context-free languages) which extends the classical one and applies to HR and VR sets of graphs.

We establish that every equational graph can be characterized, up to isomorphism, by a formula of monadic second-order logic. It follows that the isomorphism of two equational graphs is decidable. Equational graphs can be used to describe the behaviour of recursive applicative program schemes. We obtain a sufficient and decidable condition for the equivalence of these program schemes.

It is known that a language is context-free iff it is the set of borders of the trees of recognizable set, where the border of a (labelled) tree is the word consisting of its leaf labels read from left to right.We give a generalization of this result in terms of planar graphs of bounded tree-width. Here the border of a planar graph is the word of edge labels of a path which borders a face for some planar embedding. We prove that a language is context-free iff it is the set of borders of the graphs of a set of (labelled) planar graphs of bounded tree-width which is definable by a formula of monadic second-order logic.

We consider monadic second order logic (MSO) and the modal μ-calculus (Lμ) over transition systems (Kripke structures). It is well known that every class of transition systems which is definable by a sentence of Lμ is definable by a sentence of MSO as well. It will be shown that the converse is also true for an important fragment of MSO: every class of transition systems which is MSO-definable and which is closed under bisimulation - i.e., the sentence does not distinguish between bisimilar models - is also Lμ-definable. Hence we obtain the following expressive completeness result: the bisimulation invariant fragment of MSO and Lμ are equivalent. The result was proved by David Janin and Igor Walukiewicz. Our presentation is based on their article [91]. The main step is the development of automata-based characterizations of Lμ over arbitrary transition systems and of MSO over transition trees (see also Chapter 16). It turns out that there is a general notion of automaton subsuming both characterizations, so we obtain a common ground to compare these two logics. Moreover we need the notion of the ω-unravelling for a transition system, on the one hand to obtain a bisimilar transition tree and on the other hand to increase the possibilities of choosing successors.

We study the language-theoretical aspects of parameterized communicating automata (PCAs), in which processes communicate via rendez-vous. A given PCA can be run on any topology of bounded degree such as pipelines, rings, ranked trees, and grids. We show that, under a context bound, which restricts the local behavior of each process, PCAs are effectively complementable. Complementability is considered a key aspect of robust automata models and can, in particular, be exploited for verification. In this paper, we use it to obtain a characterization of context-bounded PCAs in terms of monadic second-order (MSO) logic. As the emptiness problem for context-bounded PCAs is decidable for the classes of pipelines, rings, and trees, their model-checking problem wrt. MSO properties also becomes decidable. While previous work on model checking parameterized systems typically uses temporal logics without next operator, our MSO logic allows one to express several natural next modalities.

Every graph can be represented uniquely in a hierarchical way by means of its modular decomposition. We establish that the modular decomposition of a linearly ordered graph is definable in monadic second-order (MS) logic in the graph itself. The modular decomposition does not depend on the linear order of the given graph. A set of graphs is recognizable w.r.t. the operations associated with graph substitution iff it is definable by a formula of an extension of MS logic based on the use of auxilliary linear orderings. This paper is an extended abstract: complete proofs can be found in [7].

Model-checking is one of the most powerful techniques for verifying systems and programs, which since the pioneering results by Knapik et al., Ong, and Kobayashi, is known to be applicable to functional programs with higher-order types against properties expressed by formulas of monadic second-order logic. What happens when the program in question, in addition to higher-order functions, also exhibits algebraic effects such as probabilistic choice or global store? The results in the literature range from those, mostly positive, about nondeterministic effects, to those about probabilistic effects, in the presence of which even mere reachability becomes undecidable. This work takes a fresh and general look at the problem, first of all showing that there is an elegant and natural way of viewing higher-order programs producing algebraic effects as ordinary higher-order recursion schemes. We then move on to consider effect handlers, showing that in their presence the model checking problem is bound to be undecidable in the general case, while it stays decidable when handlers have a simple syntactic form, still sufficient to capture so-called generic effects . Along the way, we hint at how a general specification language could look like, this way justifying some of the results in the literature, and deriving new ones.

We establish that every monadic second-order logic (MSO) formula on graphs with bounded treedepth is decidable in a constant number of rounds within the CONGEST model. To our knowledge, this marks the first meta-theorem regarding distributed model-checking. Various optimization problems on graphs are expressible in MSO. Examples include determining whether a graph G has a clique of size k, whether it admits a coloring with k colors, whether it contains a graph H as a subgraph or minor, or whether terminal vertices in G could be connected via vertex-disjoint paths. Our meta-theorem significantly enhances the work of Bousquet et al. [PODC 2022], which was focused on distributed certification of MSO on graphs with bounded treedepth. Moreover, our results can be extended to solving optimization and counting problems expressible in MSO, in graphs of bounded treedepth.

On the expressiveness of second-order spider diagrams

This tutorial will present an overview of the use of Monadic Second-Order Logic to describe sets of finite graphs and graph transformations, in relation with the notions of tree-width and clique-width. It will review applications to the construction of algorithms, to Graph Theory and to the extension to graphs of Formal Language Theory concepts.

In this chapter we present a method for obtaining lower bounds on the computational complexity of logical theories, and give several illustrations of its use. This method is an extension of widely used procedures for proving the recursive undecidability of logical theories. (See Rabin [1965] and Eršov et al. [1965].) One important aspect of this method is that it is based on a family of inseparability results for certain logical problems, closely related to the well-known inseparability result of Trakhtenbrot (as refined by Vaught), that no recursive set separates the logically valid sentences from those which are false in some finite model, as long as the underlying language has at least one non-unary relation symbol. By using these inseparability results as a foundation, we are able to obtain hereditary lower bounds, i.e., bounds which apply uniformly to all subtheories of the theory. The second important aspect of this method is that we use interpretations to transfer lower bounds from one theory to another. By doing this we eliminate the need to code machine computations into the models of the theory being studied. (The coding of computations is done once and for all in proving the inseparability results.) By using interpretations, attention is centred on much simpler definability considerations, viz., what kinds of binary relations on large finite sets can be defined using short formulas in models of the theory. This is conceptually much simpler than other approaches that have been proposed for obtaining lower bounds, such as the method of bounded concatenations of Fleischmann et al. [1977]. We will deal primarily with theories in first-order logic and monadic second-order logic.

Graph Operations, Graph Transformations and Monadic Second-Order Logic A survey

Graph Operations, Graph Transformations and Monadic Second-Order Logic:: A survey

The paper deals with logically definable families of sets (or point-sets) of rational numbers. In particular we are interested whether the families definable over the real line with a unary predicate for the rationals are definable over the rational order alone. Let φ(X,Y ) and ψ(Y ) range over formulas in the first-order monadic language of order. Let Q be the set of rationals and F be the family of subsets J of Q such that φ(Q,J) holds over the real line. The question arises whether, for every φ, F can be defined by means of an appropriate ψ(Y ) interpreted over the rational order. We answer the question negatively. The answer remains negative if the firstorder logic is strengthen to weak monadic second-order logic. The answer is positive for the restricted version of monadic second-order logic where set quantifiers range over open sets. The case of full monadic second-order logic remains open.

In this article, we develop a new and somewhat unexpected connection between higher-order model-checking and linear logic. Our starting point is the observation that once embedded in the relational semantics of linear logic, the Church encoding of any higher-order recursion scheme (HORS) comes together with a dual Church encoding of an alternating tree automata (ATA) of the same signature. Moreover, the interaction between the relational interpretations of the HORS and of the ATA identifies the set of accepting states of the tree automaton against the infinite tree generated by the recursion scheme. We show how to extend this result to alternating parity automata (APT) by introducing a parametric version of the exponential modality of linear logic, capturing the formal properties of colors (or priorities) in higher-order model-checking. We show in particular how to reunderstand in this way the type-theoretic approach to higher-order model-checking developed by Kobayashi and Ong. We briefly explain in the end of the paper how this analysis driven by linear logic results in a new and purely semantic proof of decidability of the formulas of the monadic second-order logic for higher-order recursion schemes.