@misc{5436, abstract = {Recently there has been a significant effort to handle quantitative properties in formal verification and synthesis. While weighted automata over finite and infinite words provide a natural and flexible framework to express quantitative properties, perhaps surprisingly, some basic system properties such as average response time cannot be expressed using weighted automata, nor in any other know decidable formalism. In this work, we introduce nested weighted automata as a natural extension of weighted automata which makes it possible to express important quantitative properties such as average response time. In nested weighted automata, a master automaton spins off and collects results from weighted slave automata, each of which computes a quantity along a finite portion of an infinite word. Nested weighted automata can be viewed as the quantitative analogue of monitor automata, which are used in run-time verification. We establish an almost complete decidability picture for the basic decision problems about nested weighted automata, and illustrate their applicability in several domains. In particular, nested weighted automata can be used to decide average response time properties.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {29}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{Nested weighted automata}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-170-v2-2}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5437, abstract = {We consider the core algorithmic problems related to verification of systems with respect to three classical quantitative properties, namely, the mean-payoff property, the ratio property, and the minimum initial credit for energy property. The algorithmic problem given a graph and a quantitative property asks to compute the optimal value (the infimum value over all traces) from every node of the graph. We consider graphs with constant treewidth, and it is well-known that the control-flow graphs of most programs have constant treewidth. Let $n$ denote the number of nodes of a graph, $m$ the number of edges (for constant treewidth graphs $m=O(n)$) and $W$ the largest absolute value of the weights. Our main theoretical results are as follows. First, for constant treewidth graphs we present an algorithm that approximates the mean-payoff value within a multiplicative factor of $\epsilon$ in time $O(n \cdot \log (n/\epsilon))$ and linear space, as compared to the classical algorithms that require quadratic time. Second, for the ratio property we present an algorithm that for constant treewidth graphs works in time $O(n \cdot \log (|a\cdot b|))=O(n\cdot\log (n\cdot W))$, when the output is $\frac{a}{b}$, as compared to the previously best known algorithm with running time $O(n^2 \cdot \log (n\cdot W))$. Third, for the minimum initial credit problem we show that (i)~for general graphs the problem can be solved in $O(n^2\cdot m)$ time and the associated decision problem can be solved in $O(n\cdot m)$ time, improving the previous known $O(n^3\cdot m\cdot \log (n\cdot W))$ and $O(n^2 \cdot m)$ bounds, respectively; and (ii)~for constant treewidth graphs we present an algorithm that requires $O(n\cdot \log n)$ time, improving the previous known $O(n^4 \cdot \log (n \cdot W))$ bound. We have implemented some of our algorithms and show that they present a significant speedup on standard benchmarks. }, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Pavlogiannis, Andreas}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {27}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{Faster algorithms for quantitative verification in constant treewidth graphs}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-330-v2-1}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5438, abstract = {The edit distance between two words w1, w2 is the minimal number of word operations (letter insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to transform w1 to w2. The edit distance generalizes to languages L1, L2, where the edit distance is the minimal number k such that for every word from L1 there exists a word in L2 with edit distance at most k. We study the edit distance computation problem between pushdown automata and their subclasses. The problem of computing edit distance to a pushdown automaton is undecidable, and in practice, the interesting question is to compute the edit distance from a pushdown automaton (the implementation, a standard model for programs with recursion) to a regular language (the specification). In this work, we present a complete picture of decidability and complexity for deciding whether, for a given threshold k, the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is at most k. }, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Otop, Jan}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {15}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{Edit distance for pushdown automata}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-334-v1-1}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5439, abstract = {The target discounted-sum problem is the following: Given a rational discount factor 0 < λ < 1 and three rational values a, b, and t, does there exist a finite or an infinite sequence w ε(a, b)∗ or w ε(a, b)w, such that Σ|w| i=0 w(i)λi equals t? The problem turns out to relate to many fields of mathematics and computer science, and its decidability question is surprisingly hard to solve. We solve the finite version of the problem, and show the hardness of the infinite version, linking it to various areas and open problems in mathematics and computer science: β-expansions, discounted-sum automata, piecewise affine maps, and generalizations of the Cantor set. We provide some partial results to the infinite version, among which are solutions to its restriction to eventually-periodic sequences and to the cases that λ λ 1/2 or λ = 1/n, for every n ε N. We use our results for solving some open problems on discounted-sum automata, among which are the exact-value problem for nondeterministic automata over finite words and the universality and inclusion problems for functional automata. }, author = {Boker, Udi and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {20}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{The target discounted-sum problem}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-335-v1-1}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5440, abstract = {Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of the population affects the outcome of the evolutionary process. Evolutionary graph theory is a powerful approach to study this phenomenon. There are two graphs. The interaction graph specifies who interacts with whom for payoff in the context of evolution. The replacement graph specifies who competes with whom for reproduction. The vertices of the two graphs are the same, and each vertex corresponds to an individual of the population. The fitness (or the reproductive rate) is a non-negative number, and depends on the payoff. A key quantity is the fixation probability of a new mutant. It is defined as the probability that a newly introduced mutant (on a single vertex) generates a lineage of offspring which eventually takes over the entire population of resident individuals. The basic computational questions are as follows: (i) the qualitative question asks whether the fixation probability is positive; and (ii) the quantitative approximation question asks for an approximation of the fixation probability. Our main results are as follows: First, we consider a special case of the general problem, where the residents do not reproduce. We show that the qualitative question is NP-complete, and the quantitative approximation question is #P-complete, and the hardness results hold even in the special case where the interaction and the replacement graphs coincide. Second, we show that in general both the qualitative and the quantitative approximation questions are PSPACE-complete. The PSPACE-hardness result for quantitative approximation holds even when the fitness is always positive.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Nowak, Martin}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {18}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{The complexity of evolutionary games on graphs}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-323-v2-2}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5441, abstract = {We study algorithmic questions for concurrent systems where the transitions are labeled from a complete, closed semiring, and path properties are algebraic with semiring operations. The algebraic path properties can model dataflow analysis problems, the shortest path problem, and many other natural problems that arise in program analysis. We consider that each component of the concurrent system is a graph with constant treewidth, a property satisfied by the controlflow graphs of most programs. We allow for multiple possible queries, which arise naturally in demand driven dataflow analysis. The study of multiple queries allows us to consider the tradeoff between the resource usage of the one-time preprocessing and for each individual query. The traditional approach constructs the product graph of all components and applies the best-known graph algorithm on the product. In this approach, even the answer to a single query requires the transitive closure (i.e., the results of all possible queries), which provides no room for tradeoff between preprocessing and query time. Our main contributions are algorithms that significantly improve the worst-case running time of the traditional approach, and provide various tradeoffs depending on the number of queries. For example, in a concurrent system of two components, the traditional approach requires hexic time in the worst case for answering one query as well as computing the transitive closure, whereas we show that with one-time preprocessing in almost cubic time, each subsequent query can be answered in at most linear time, and even the transitive closure can be computed in almost quartic time. Furthermore, we establish conditional optimality results showing that the worst-case running time of our algorithms cannot be improved without achieving major breakthroughs in graph algorithms (i.e., improving the worst-case bound for the shortest path problem in general graphs). Preliminary experimental results show that our algorithms perform favorably on several benchmarks.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Goharshady, Amir and Pavlogiannis, Andreas}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {24}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{Algorithms for algebraic path properties in concurrent systems of constant treewidth components}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-340-v1-1}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5443, abstract = {POMDPs are standard models for probabilistic planning problems, where an agent interacts with an uncertain environment. We study the problem of almost-sure reachability, where given a set of target states, the question is to decide whether there is a policy to ensure that the target set is reached with probability 1 (almost-surely). While in general the problem is EXPTIME-complete, in many practical cases policies with a small amount of memory suffice. Moreover, the existing solution to the problem is explicit, which first requires to construct explicitly an exponential reduction to a belief-support MDP. In this work, we first study the existence of observation-stationary strategies, which is NP-complete, and then small-memory strategies. We present a symbolic algorithm by an efficient encoding to SAT and using a SAT solver for the problem. We report experimental results demonstrating the scalability of our symbolic (SAT-based) approach.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Chmelik, Martin and Davies, Jessica}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {23}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{A symbolic SAT-based algorithm for almost-sure reachability with small strategies in POMDPs}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-325-v2-1}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5444, abstract = {A comprehensive understanding of the clonal evolution of cancer is critical for understanding neoplasia. Genome-wide sequencing data enables evolutionary studies at unprecedented depth. However, classical phylogenetic methods often struggle with noisy sequencing data of impure DNA samples and fail to detect subclones that have different evolutionary trajectories. We have developed a tool, called Treeomics, that allows us to reconstruct the phylogeny of a cancer with commonly available sequencing technologies. Using Bayesian inference and Integer Linear Programming, robust phylogenies consistent with the biological processes underlying cancer evolution were obtained for pancreatic, ovarian, and prostate cancers. Furthermore, Treeomics correctly identified sequencing artifacts such as those resulting from low statistical power; nearly 7% of variants were misclassified by conventional statistical methods. These artifacts can skew phylogenies by creating illusory tumor heterogeneity among distinct samples. Importantly, we show that the evolutionary trees generated with Treeomics are mathematically optimal.}, author = {Reiter, Johannes and Makohon-Moore, Alvin and Gerold, Jeffrey and Bozic, Ivana and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Iacobuzio-Donahue, Christine and Vogelstein, Bert and Nowak, Martin}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {25}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{Reconstructing robust phylogenies of metastatic cancers}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2015-399-v1-1}, year = {2015}, } @misc{5549, abstract = {This repository contains the experimental part of the CAV 2015 publication Counterexample Explanation by Learning Small Strategies in Markov Decision Processes. We extended the probabilistic model checker PRISM to represent strategies of Markov Decision Processes as Decision Trees. The archive contains a java executable version of the extended tool (prism_dectree.jar) together with a few examples of the PRISM benchmark library. To execute the program, please have a look at the README.txt, which provides instructions and further information on the archive. The archive contains scripts that (if run often enough) reproduces the data presented in the publication.}, author = {Fellner, Andreas}, keywords = {Markov Decision Process, Decision Tree, Probabilistic Verification, Counterexample Explanation}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Experimental part of CAV 2015 publication: Counterexample Explanation by Learning Small Strategies in Markov Decision Processes}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:ISTA:28}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1474, abstract = {Cryptographic access control offers selective access to encrypted data via a combination of key management and functionality-rich cryptographic schemes, such as attribute-based encryption. Using this approach, publicly available meta-data may inadvertently leak information on the access policy that is enforced by cryptography, which renders cryptographic access control unusable in settings where this information is highly sensitive. We begin to address this problem by presenting rigorous definitions for policy privacy in cryptographic access control. For concreteness we set our results in the model of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), where we identify and formalize several different flavors of privacy, however, our framework should serve as inspiration for other models of access control. Based on our insights we propose a new system which significantly improves on the privacy properties of state-of-the-art constructions. Our design is based on a novel type of privacy-preserving attribute-based encryption, which we introduce and show how to instantiate. We present our results in the context of a cryptographic RBAC system by Ferrara et al. (CSF'13), which uses cryptography to control read access to files, while write access is still delegated to trusted monitors. We give an extension of the construction that permits cryptographic control over write access. Our construction assumes that key management uses out-of-band channels between the policy enforcer and the users but eliminates completely the need for monitoring read/write access to the data.}, author = {Ferrara, Anna and Fuchsbauer, Georg and Liu, Bin and Warinschi, Bogdan}, location = {Verona, Italy}, pages = {46--60}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Policy privacy in cryptographic access control}}, doi = {10.1109/CSF.2015.11}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1481, abstract = {Simple board games, like Tic-Tac-Toe and CONNECT-4, play an important role not only in the development of mathematical and logical skills, but also in the emotional and social development. In this paper, we address the problem of generating targeted starting positions for such games. This can facilitate new approaches for bringing novice players to mastery, and also leads to discovery of interesting game variants. We present an approach that generates starting states of varying hardness levels for player 1 in a two-player board game, given rules of the board game, the desired number of steps required for player 1 to win, and the expertise levels of the two players. Our approach leverages symbolic methods and iterative simulation to efficiently search the extremely large state space. We present experimental results that include discovery of states of varying hardness levels for several simple grid-based board games. The presence of such states for standard game variants like 4×4 Tic-Tac-Toe opens up new games to be played that have never been played as the default start state is heavily biased. }, author = {Ahmed, Umair and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Gulwani, Sumit}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, location = {Austin, TX, USA}, pages = {745 -- 752}, publisher = {AAAI Press}, title = {{Automatic generation of alternative starting positions for simple traditional board games}}, volume = {2}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1483, abstract = {Topological data analysis offers a rich source of valuable information to study vision problems. Yet, so far we lack a theoretically sound connection to popular kernel-based learning techniques, such as kernel SVMs or kernel PCA. In this work, we establish such a connection by designing a multi-scale kernel for persistence diagrams, a stable summary representation of topological features in data. We show that this kernel is positive definite and prove its stability with respect to the 1-Wasserstein distance. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for 3D shape classification/retrieval and texture recognition show considerable performance gains of the proposed method compared to an alternative approach that is based on the recently introduced persistence landscapes.}, author = {Reininghaus, Jan and Huber, Stefan and Bauer, Ulrich and Kwitt, Roland}, location = {Boston, MA, USA}, pages = {4741 -- 4748}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{A stable multi-scale kernel for topological machine learning}}, doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2015.7299106}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1495, abstract = {Motivated by biological questions, we study configurations of equal-sized disks in the Euclidean plane that neither pack nor cover. Measuring the quality by the probability that a random point lies in exactly one disk, we show that the regular hexagonal grid gives the maximum among lattice configurations. }, author = {Edelsbrunner, Herbert and Iglesias Ham, Mabel and Kurlin, Vitaliy}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry}, location = {Ontario, Canada}, pages = {128--135}, publisher = {Queen's University}, title = {{Relaxed disk packing}}, volume = {2015-August}, year = {2015}, } @article{1497, abstract = {Detecting allelic biases from high-throughput sequencing data requires an approach that maximises sensitivity while minimizing false positives. Here, we present Allelome.PRO, an automated user-friendly bioinformatics pipeline, which uses high-throughput sequencing data from reciprocal crosses of two genetically distinct mouse strains to detect allele-specific expression and chromatin modifications. Allelome.PRO extends approaches used in previous studies that exclusively analyzed imprinted expression to give a complete picture of the ‘allelome’ by automatically categorising the allelic expression of all genes in a given cell type into imprinted, strain-biased, biallelic or non-informative. Allelome.PRO offers increased sensitivity to analyze lowly expressed transcripts, together with a robust false discovery rate empirically calculated from variation in the sequencing data. We used RNA-seq data from mouse embryonic fibroblasts from F1 reciprocal crosses to determine a biologically relevant allelic ratio cutoff, and define for the first time an entire allelome. Furthermore, we show that Allelome.PRO detects differential enrichment of H3K4me3 over promoters from ChIP-seq data validating the RNA-seq results. This approach can be easily extended to analyze histone marks of active enhancers, or transcription factor binding sites and therefore provides a powerful tool to identify candidate cis regulatory elements genome wide.}, author = {Andergassen, Daniel and Dotter, Christoph and Kulinski, Tomasz and Guenzl, Philipp and Bammer, Philipp and Barlow, Denise and Pauler, Florian and Hudson, Quanah}, journal = {Nucleic Acids Research}, number = {21}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, title = {{Allelome.PRO, a pipeline to define allele-specific genomic features from high-throughput sequencing data}}, doi = {10.1093/nar/gkv727}, volume = {43}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1498, abstract = {Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms play an important role in many critical/high-availability applications. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Nonetheless there is surprisingly little language and verification support to build distributed systems based on fault-tolerant algorithms. In this paper, we present some of the challenges that a designer has to overcome to implement a fault-tolerant distributed system. Then we review different models that have been proposed to reason about distributed algorithms and sketch how such a model can form the basis for a domain-specific programming language. Adopting a high-level programming model can simplify the programmer's life and make the code amenable to automated verification, while still compiling to efficiently executable code. We conclude by summarizing the current status of an ongoing language design and implementation project that is based on this idea.}, author = {Dragoi, Cezara and Henzinger, Thomas A and Zufferey, Damien}, isbn = {978-3-939897-80-4 }, location = {Asilomar, CA, United States}, pages = {90 -- 102}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{The need for language support for fault-tolerant distributed systems}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2015.90}, volume = {32}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1499, abstract = {We consider weighted automata with both positive and negative integer weights on edges and study the problem of synchronization using adaptive strategies that may only observe whether the current weight-level is negative or nonnegative. We show that the synchronization problem is decidable in polynomial time for deterministic weighted automata.}, author = {Kretinsky, Jan and Larsen, Kim and Laursen, Simon and Srba, Jiří}, location = {Madrid, Spain}, pages = {142 -- 154}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Polynomial time decidability of weighted synchronization under partial observability}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.142}, volume = {42}, year = {2015}, } @article{1501, abstract = {We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are a standard model for probabilistic systems. We focus on qualitative properties for MDPs that can express that desired behaviors of the system arise almost-surely (with probability 1) or with positive probability. We introduce a new simulation relation to capture the refinement relation of MDPs with respect to qualitative properties, and present discrete graph algorithms with quadratic complexity to compute the simulation relation. We present an automated technique for assume-guarantee style reasoning for compositional analysis of two-player games by giving a counterexample guided abstraction-refinement approach to compute our new simulation relation. We show a tight link between two-player games and MDPs, and as a consequence the results for games are lifted to MDPs with qualitative properties. We have implemented our algorithms and show that the compositional analysis leads to significant improvements. }, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Chmelik, Martin and Daca, Przemyslaw}, journal = {Formal Methods in System Design}, number = {2}, pages = {230 -- 264}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{CEGAR for compositional analysis of qualitative properties in Markov decision processes}}, doi = {10.1007/s10703-015-0235-2}, volume = {47}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1502, abstract = {We extend the theory of input-output conformance with operators for merge and quotient. The former is useful when testing against multiple requirements or views. The latter can be used to generate tests for patches of an already tested system. Both operators can combine systems with different action alphabets, which is usually the case when constructing complex systems and specifications from parts, for instance different views as well as newly defined functionality of a~previous version of the system.}, author = {Beneš, Nikola and Daca, Przemyslaw and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kretinsky, Jan and Nickovic, Dejan}, isbn = {978-1-4503-3471-6}, location = {Montreal, QC, Canada}, pages = {101 -- 110}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Complete composition operators for IOCO-testing theory}}, doi = {10.1145/2737166.2737175}, year = {2015}, } @article{1505, abstract = {This paper is aimed at deriving the universality of the largest eigenvalue of a class of high-dimensional real or complex sample covariance matrices of the form W N =Σ 1/2XX∗Σ 1/2 . Here, X = (xij )M,N is an M× N random matrix with independent entries xij , 1 ≤ i M,≤ 1 ≤ j ≤ N such that Exij = 0, E|xij |2 = 1/N . On dimensionality, we assume that M = M(N) and N/M → d ε (0, ∞) as N ∞→. For a class of general deterministic positive-definite M × M matrices Σ , under some additional assumptions on the distribution of xij 's, we show that the limiting behavior of the largest eigenvalue of W N is universal, via pursuing a Green function comparison strategy raised in [Probab. Theory Related Fields 154 (2012) 341-407, Adv. Math. 229 (2012) 1435-1515] by Erd″os, Yau and Yin for Wigner matrices and extended by Pillai and Yin [Ann. Appl. Probab. 24 (2014) 935-1001] to sample covariance matrices in the null case (&Epsi = I ). Consequently, in the standard complex case (Ex2 ij = 0), combing this universality property and the results known for Gaussian matrices obtained by El Karoui in [Ann. Probab. 35 (2007) 663-714] (nonsingular case) and Onatski in [Ann. Appl. Probab. 18 (2008) 470-490] (singular case), we show that after an appropriate normalization the largest eigenvalue of W N converges weakly to the type 2 Tracy-Widom distribution TW2 . Moreover, in the real case, we show that whenΣ is spiked with a fixed number of subcritical spikes, the type 1 Tracy-Widom limit TW1 holds for the normalized largest eigenvalue of W N , which extends a result of Féral and Péché in [J. Math. Phys. 50 (2009) 073302] to the scenario of nondiagonal Σ and more generally distributed X . In summary, we establish the Tracy-Widom type universality for the largest eigenvalue of generally distributed sample covariance matrices under quite light assumptions on &Sigma . Applications of these limiting results to statistical signal detection and structure recognition of separable covariance matrices are also discussed.}, author = {Bao, Zhigang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang}, journal = {Annals of Statistics}, number = {1}, pages = {382 -- 421}, publisher = {Institute of Mathematical Statistics}, title = {{Universality for the largest eigenvalue of sample covariance matrices with general population}}, doi = {10.1214/14-AOS1281}, volume = {43}, year = {2015}, } @article{1506, abstract = {Consider the square random matrix An = (aij)n,n, where {aij:= a(n)ij , i, j = 1, . . . , n} is a collection of independent real random variables with means zero and variances one. Under the additional moment condition supn max1≤i,j ≤n Ea4ij <∞, we prove Girko's logarithmic law of det An in the sense that as n→∞ log | detAn| ? (1/2) log(n-1)! d/→√(1/2) log n N(0, 1).}, author = {Bao, Zhigang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang}, journal = {Bernoulli}, number = {3}, pages = {1600 -- 1628}, publisher = {Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability}, title = {{The logarithmic law of random determinant}}, doi = {10.3150/14-BEJ615}, volume = {21}, year = {2015}, }