@phdthesis{1397,
  abstract     = {We study partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with objectives used in verification and artificial intelligence. The qualitative analysis problem given a POMDP and an objective asks whether there is a strategy (policy) to ensure that the objective is satisfied almost surely (with probability 1), resp. with positive probability (with probability greater than 0). For POMDPs with limit-average payoff, where a reward value in the interval [0,1] is associated to every transition, and the payoff of an infinite path is the long-run average of the rewards, we consider two types of path constraints: (i) a quantitative limit-average constraint defines the set of paths where the payoff is at least a given threshold L1 = 1. Our main results for qualitative limit-average constraint under almost-sure winning are as follows: (i) the problem of deciding the existence of a finite-memory controller is EXPTIME-complete; and (ii) the problem of deciding the existence of an infinite-memory controller is undecidable. For quantitative limit-average constraints we show that the problem of deciding the existence of a finite-memory controller is undecidable. We present a prototype implementation of our EXPTIME algorithm. For POMDPs with w-regular conditions specified as parity objectives, while the qualitative analysis problems are known to be undecidable even for very special case of parity objectives, we establish decidability (with optimal complexity) of the qualitative analysis problems for POMDPs with parity objectives under finite-memory strategies. We establish optimal (exponential) memory bounds and EXPTIME-completeness of the qualitative analysis problems under finite-memory strategies for POMDPs with parity objectives. Based on our theoretical algorithms we also present a practical approach, where we design heuristics to deal with the exponential complexity, and have applied our implementation on a number of well-known POMDP examples for robotics applications. For POMDPs with a set of target states and an integer cost associated with every transition, we study the optimization objective that asks to minimize the expected total cost of reaching a state in the target set, while ensuring that the target set is reached almost surely. We show that for general integer costs approximating the optimal cost is undecidable. For positive costs, our results are as follows: (i) we establish matching lower and upper bounds for the optimal cost, both double and exponential in the POMDP state space size; (ii) we show that the problem of approximating the optimal cost is decidable and present approximation algorithms that extend existing algorithms for POMDPs with finite-horizon objectives. We show experimentally that it performs well in many examples of interest. We study more deeply the problem of almost-sure reachability, where  given a set of target states, the question is to decide whether there is a strategy to ensure that the target set is reached almost surely. While in general the problem EXPTIME-complete, in many practical cases strategies 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. 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. Decentralized POMDPs (DEC-POMDPs) extend POMDPs to a multi-agent setting, where several agents operate in an uncertain environment independently to achieve a joint objective. In this work we consider Goal DEC-POMDPs, where given a set of target states, the objective is to ensure that the target set is reached with minimal cost. We consider the indefinite-horizon (infinite-horizon with either discounted-sum, or undiscounted-sum, where absorbing goal states have zero-cost) problem. We present a new and novel method to solve the problem that extends methods for finite-horizon DEC-POMDPs and the real-time dynamic programming approach for POMDPs. We present experimental results on several examples, and show that our approach presents promising results. In the end we present a short summary of a few other results related to verification of MDPs and POMDPs.},
  author       = {Chmelik, Martin},
  issn         = {2663-337X},
  pages        = {232},
  publisher    = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria},
  title        = {{Algorithms for partially observable markov decision processes}},
  year         = {2016},
}

@article{1426,
  abstract     = {Brood parasites exploit their host in order to increase their own fitness. Typically, this results in an arms race between parasite trickery and host defence. Thus, it is puzzling to observe hosts that accept parasitism without any resistance. The ‘mafia’ hypothesis suggests that these hosts accept parasitism to avoid retaliation. Retaliation has been shown to evolve when the hosts condition their response to mafia parasites, who use depredation as a targeted response to rejection. However, it is unclear if acceptance would also emerge when ‘farming’ parasites are present in the population. Farming parasites use depredation to synchronize the timing with the host, destroying mature clutches to force the host to re-nest. Herein, we develop an evolutionary model to analyse the interaction between depredatory parasites and their hosts. We show that coevolutionary cycles between farmers and mafia can still induce host acceptance of brood parasites. However, this equilibrium is unstable and in the long-run the dynamics of this host–parasite interaction exhibits strong oscillations: when farmers are the majority, accepters conditional to mafia (the host will reject first and only accept after retaliation by the parasite) have a higher fitness than unconditional accepters (the host always accepts parasitism). This leads to an increase in mafia parasites’ fitness and in turn induce an optimal environment for accepter hosts.},
  author       = {Chakra, Maria and Hilbe, Christian and Traulsen, Arne},
  journal      = {Royal Society Open Science},
  number       = {5},
  publisher    = {Royal Society},
  title        = {{Coevolutionary interactions between farmers and mafia induce host acceptance of avian brood parasites}},
  doi          = {10.1098/rsos.160036},
  volume       = {3},
  year         = {2016},
}

@inproceedings{1138,
  abstract     = {Automata with monitor counters, where the transitions do not depend on counter values, and nested weighted automata are two expressive automata-theoretic frameworks for quantitative properties. For a well-studied and wide class of quantitative functions, we establish that automata with monitor counters and nested weighted automata are equivalent. We study for the first time such quantitative automata under probabilistic semantics. We show that several problems that are undecidable for the classical questions of emptiness and universality become decidable under the probabilistic semantics. We present a complete picture of decidability for such automata, and even an almost-complete picture of computational complexity, for the probabilistic questions we consider.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium},
  location     = {New York, NY, USA},
  pages        = {76 -- 85},
  publisher    = {IEEE},
  title        = {{Quantitative automata under probabilistic semantics}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2933575.2933588},
  year         = {2016},
}

@article{1529,
  abstract     = {We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and an integer cost associated with every transition. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost of reaching a state in the target set, while ensuring that the target set is reached almost surely (with probability 1). We show that for integer costs approximating the optimal cost is undecidable. For positive costs, our results are as follows: (i) we establish matching lower and upper bounds for the optimal cost, both double exponential in the POMDP state space size; (ii) we show that the problem of approximating the optimal cost is decidable and present approximation algorithms developing on the existing algorithms for POMDPs with finite-horizon objectives. While the worst-case running time of our algorithm is double exponential, we also present efficient stopping criteria for the algorithm and show experimentally that it performs well in many examples of interest.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Chmelik, Martin and Gupta, Raghav and Kanodia, Ayush},
  journal      = {Artificial Intelligence},
  pages        = {26 -- 48},
  publisher    = {Elsevier},
  title        = {{Optimal cost almost-sure reachability in POMDPs}},
  doi          = {10.1016/j.artint.2016.01.007},
  volume       = {234},
  year         = {2016},
}

@inproceedings{1437,
  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 Goharshady, Amir and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Pavlogiannis, Andreas},
  location     = {St. Petersburg, FL, USA},
  pages        = {733 -- 747},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Algorithms for algebraic path properties in concurrent systems of constant treewidth components}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2837614.2837624},
  volume       = {20-22},
  year         = {2016},
}

@inproceedings{1386,
  abstract     = {We consider nondeterministic probabilistic programs with the most basic liveness property of termination. We present efficient methods for termination analysis of nondeterministic probabilistic programs with polynomial guards and assignments. Our approach is through synthesis of polynomial ranking supermartingales, that on one hand significantly generalizes linear ranking supermartingales and on the other hand is a counterpart of polynomial ranking-functions for proving termination of nonprobabilistic programs. The approach synthesizes polynomial ranking-supermartingales through Positivstellensatz's, yielding an efficient method which is not only sound, but also semi-complete over a large subclass of programs. We show experimental results to demonstrate that our approach can handle several classical programs with complex polynomial guards and assignments, and can synthesize efficient quadratic ranking-supermartingales when a linear one does not exist even for simple affine programs.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Fu, Hongfei and Goharshady, Amir},
  location     = {Toronto, Canada},
  pages        = {3 -- 22},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Termination analysis of probabilistic programs through Positivstellensatz's}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-41528-4_1},
  volume       = {9779},
  year         = {2016},
}

@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{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{1559,
  abstract     = {There are deep, yet largely unexplored, connections between computer science and biology. Both disciplines examine how information proliferates in time and space. Central results in computer science describe the complexity of algorithms that solve certain classes of problems. An algorithm is deemed efficient if it can solve a problem in polynomial time, which means the running time of the algorithm is a polynomial function of the length of the input. There are classes of harder problems for which the fastest possible algorithm requires exponential time. Another criterion is the space requirement of the algorithm. There is a crucial distinction between algorithms that can find a solution, verify a solution, or list several distinct solutions in given time and space. The complexity hierarchy that is generated in this way is the foundation of theoretical computer science. Precise complexity results can be notoriously difficult. The famous question whether polynomial time equals nondeterministic polynomial time (i.e., P = NP) is one of the hardest open problems in computer science and all of mathematics. Here, we consider simple processes of ecological and evolutionary spatial dynamics. The basic question is: What is the probability that a new invader (or a new mutant)will take over a resident population?We derive precise complexity results for a variety of scenarios. We therefore show that some fundamental questions in this area cannot be answered by simple equations (assuming that P is not equal to NP).},
  author       = {Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Nowak, Martin},
  journal      = {PNAS},
  number       = {51},
  pages        = {15636 -- 15641},
  publisher    = {National Academy of Sciences},
  title        = {{Computational complexity of ecological and evolutionary spatial dynamics}},
  doi          = {10.1073/pnas.1511366112},
  volume       = {112},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1594,
  abstract     = {Quantitative extensions of temporal logics have recently attracted significant attention. In this work, we study frequency LTL (fLTL), an extension of LTL which allows to speak about frequencies of events along an execution. Such an extension is particularly useful for probabilistic systems that often cannot fulfil strict qualitative guarantees on the behaviour. It has been recently shown that controller synthesis for Markov decision processes and fLTL is decidable when all the bounds on frequencies are 1. As a step towards a complete quantitative solution, we show that the problem is decidable for the fragment fLTL\GU, where U does not occur in the scope of G (but still F can). Our solution is based on a novel translation of such quantitative formulae into equivalent deterministic automata.},
  author       = {Forejt, Vojtěch and Krčál, Jan and Kretinsky, Jan},
  location     = {Suva, Fiji},
  pages        = {162 -- 177},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Controller synthesis for MDPs and frequency LTL\GU}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-662-48899-7_12},
  volume       = {9450},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1598,
  abstract     = {We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with specifications given as Büchi (liveness) objectives, and examine the problem of computing the set of almost-sure winning vertices such that the objective can be ensured with probability 1 from these vertices. We study for the first time the average-case complexity of the classical algorithm for computing the set of almost-sure winning vertices for MDPs with Büchi objectives. Our contributions are as follows: First, we show that for MDPs with constant out-degree the expected number of iterations is at most logarithmic and the average-case running time is linear (as compared to the worst-case linear number of iterations and quadratic time complexity). Second, for the average-case analysis over all MDPs we show that the expected number of iterations is constant and the average-case running time is linear (again as compared to the worst-case linear number of iterations and quadratic time complexity). Finally we also show that when all MDPs are equally likely, the probability that the classical algorithm requires more than a constant number of iterations is exponentially small.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Joglekar, Manas and Shah, Nisarg},
  journal      = {Theoretical Computer Science},
  number       = {3},
  pages        = {71 -- 89},
  publisher    = {Elsevier},
  title        = {{Average case analysis of the classical algorithm for Markov decision processes with Büchi objectives}},
  doi          = {10.1016/j.tcs.2015.01.050},
  volume       = {573},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1601,
  abstract     = {We propose a flexible exchange format for ω-automata, as typically used in formal verification, and implement support for it in a range of established tools. Our aim is to simplify the interaction of tools, helping the research community to build upon other people’s work. A key feature of the format is the use of very generic acceptance conditions, specified by Boolean combinations of acceptance primitives, rather than being limited to common cases such as Büchi, Streett, or Rabin. Such flexibility in the choice of acceptance conditions can be exploited in applications, for example in probabilistic model checking, and furthermore encourages the development of acceptance-agnostic tools for automata manipulations. The format allows acceptance conditions that are either state-based or transition-based, and also supports alternating automata.},
  author       = {Babiak, Tomáš and Blahoudek, František and Duret Lutz, Alexandre and Klein, Joachim and Kretinsky, Jan and Mueller, Daniel and Parker, David and Strejček, Jan},
  location     = {San Francisco, CA, United States},
  pages        = {479 -- 486},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{The Hanoi omega-automata format}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_31},
  volume       = {9206},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1602,
  abstract     = {Interprocedural analysis is at the heart of numerous applications in programming languages, such as alias analysis, constant propagation, etc. Recursive state machines (RSMs) are standard models for interprocedural analysis. We consider a general framework with RSMs where the transitions are labeled from a semiring, and path properties are algebraic with semiring operations. RSMs with algebraic path properties can model interprocedural dataflow analysis problems, the shortest path problem, the most probable path problem, etc. The traditional algorithms for interprocedural analysis focus on path properties where the starting point is fixed as the entry point of a specific method. In this work, we consider possible multiple queries as required in many applications such as in alias analysis. The study of multiple queries allows us to bring in a very important algorithmic distinction between the resource usage of the one-time preprocessing vs for each individual query. The second aspect that we consider is that the control flow graphs for most programs have constant treewidth. Our main contributions are simple and implementable algorithms that supportmultiple queries for algebraic path properties for RSMs that have constant treewidth. Our theoretical results show that our algorithms have small additional one-time preprocessing, but can answer subsequent queries significantly faster as compared to the current best-known solutions for several important problems, such as interprocedural reachability and shortest path. We provide a prototype implementation for interprocedural reachability and intraprocedural shortest path that gives a significant speed-up on several benchmarks.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Pavlogiannis, Andreas and Goyal, Prateesh},
  journal      = {ACM SIGPLAN Notices},
  location     = {Mumbai, India},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {97 -- 109},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Faster algorithms for algebraic path properties in recursive state machines with constant treewidth}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2676726.2676979},
  volume       = {50},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1603,
  abstract     = {For deterministic systems, a counterexample to a property can simply be an error trace, whereas counterexamples in probabilistic systems are necessarily more complex. For instance, a set of erroneous traces with a sufficient cumulative probability mass can be used. Since these are too large objects to understand and manipulate, compact representations such as subchains have been considered. In the case of probabilistic systems with non-determinism, the situation is even more complex. While a subchain for a given strategy (or scheduler, resolving non-determinism) is a straightforward choice, we take a different approach. Instead, we focus on the strategy itself, and extract the most important decisions it makes, and present its succinct representation.
The key tools we employ to achieve this are (1) introducing a concept of importance of a state w.r.t. the strategy, and (2) learning using decision trees. There are three main consequent advantages of our approach. Firstly, it exploits the quantitative information on states, stressing the more important decisions. Secondly, it leads to a greater variability and degree of freedom in representing the strategies. Thirdly, the representation uses a self-explanatory data structure. In summary, our approach produces more succinct and more explainable strategies, as opposed to e.g. binary decision diagrams. Finally, our experimental results show that we can extract several rules describing the strategy even for very large systems that do not fit in memory, and based on the rules explain the erroneous behaviour.},
  author       = {Brázdil, Tomáš and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Chmelik, Martin and Fellner, Andreas and Kretinsky, Jan},
  location     = {San Francisco, CA, United States},
  pages        = {158 -- 177},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Counterexample explanation by learning small strategies in Markov decision processes}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_10},
  volume       = {9206},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1604,
  abstract     = {We consider the quantitative analysis problem for interprocedural control-flow graphs (ICFGs). The input consists of an ICFG, a positive weight function that assigns every transition a positive integer-valued number, and a labelling of the transitions (events) as good, bad, and neutral events. The weight function assigns to each transition a numerical value that represents ameasure of how good or bad an event is. The quantitative analysis problem asks whether there is a run of the ICFG where the ratio of the sum of the numerical weights of good events versus the sum of weights of bad events in the long-run is at least a given threshold (or equivalently, to compute the maximal ratio among all valid paths in the ICFG). The quantitative analysis problem for ICFGs can be solved in polynomial time, and we present an efficient and practical algorithm for the problem. We show that several problems relevant for static program analysis, such as estimating the worst-case execution time of a program or the average energy consumption of a mobile application, can be modeled in our framework. We have implemented our algorithm as a tool in the Java Soot framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with two case studies. First, we show that our framework provides a sound approach (no false positives) for the analysis of inefficiently-used containers. Second, we show that our approach can also be used for static profiling of programs which reasons about methods that are frequently invoked. Our experimental results show that our tool scales to relatively large benchmarks, and discovers relevant and useful information that can be used to optimize performance of the programs.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Pavlogiannis, Andreas and Velner, Yaron},
  isbn         = {978-1-4503-3300-9},
  journal      = {Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT },
  location     = {Mumbai, India},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {539 -- 551},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Quantitative interprocedural analysis}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2676726.2676968},
  volume       = {50},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1607,
  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 ϵ in time O(n⋅log(n/ϵ)) 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⋅log(|a⋅b|))=O(n⋅log(n⋅W)), when the output is ab, as compared to the previously best known algorithm with running time O(n2⋅log(n⋅W)). Third, for the minimum initial credit problem we show that (i) for general graphs the problem can be solved in O(n2⋅m) time and the associated decision problem can be solved in O(n⋅m) time, improving the previous known O(n3⋅m⋅log(n⋅W)) and O(n2⋅m) bounds, respectively; and (ii) for constant treewidth graphs we present an algorithm that requires O(n⋅logn) time, improving the previous known O(n4⋅log(n⋅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},
  location     = {San Francisco, CA, United States},
  pages        = {140 -- 157},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Faster algorithms for quantitative verification in constant treewidth graphs}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_9},
  volume       = {9206},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1609,
  abstract     = {The synthesis problem asks for the automatic construction of a system from its specification. In the traditional setting, the system is “constructed from scratch” rather than composed from reusable components. However, this is rare in practice, and almost every non-trivial software system relies heavily on the use of libraries of reusable components. Recently, Lustig and Vardi introduced dataflow and controlflow synthesis from libraries of reusable components. They proved that dataflow synthesis is undecidable, while controlflow synthesis is decidable. The problem of controlflow synthesis from libraries of probabilistic components was considered by Nain, Lustig and Vardi, and was shown to be decidable for qualitative analysis (that asks that the specification be satisfied with probability 1). Our main contribution for controlflow synthesis from probabilistic components is to establish better complexity bounds for the qualitative analysis problem, and to show that the more general quantitative problem is undecidable. For the qualitative analysis, we show that the problem (i) is EXPTIME-complete when the specification is given as a deterministic parity word automaton, improving the previously known 2EXPTIME upper bound; and (ii) belongs to UP ∩ coUP and is parity-games hard, when the specification is given directly as a parity condition on the components, improving the previously known EXPTIME upper bound.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Doyen, Laurent and Vardi, Moshe},
  booktitle    = {42nd International Colloquium},
  isbn         = {978-3-662-47665-9},
  location     = {Kyoto, Japan},
  pages        = {108 -- 120},
  publisher    = {Springer Nature},
  title        = {{The complexity of synthesis from probabilistic components}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-662-47666-6_9},
  volume       = {9135},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1624,
  abstract     = {Population structure can facilitate evolution of cooperation. In a structured population, cooperators can form clusters which resist exploitation by defectors. Recently, it was observed that a shift update rule is an extremely strong amplifier of cooperation in a one dimensional spatial model. For the shift update rule, an individual is chosen for reproduction proportional to fecundity; the offspring is placed next to the parent; a random individual dies. Subsequently, the population is rearranged (shifted) until all individual cells are again evenly spaced out. For large population size and a one dimensional population structure, the shift update rule favors cooperation for any benefit-to-cost ratio greater than one. But every attempt to generalize shift updating to higher dimensions while maintaining its strong effect has failed. The reason is that in two dimensions the clusters are fragmented by the movements caused by rearranging the cells. Here we introduce the natural phenomenon of a repulsive force between cells of different types. After a birth and death event, the cells are being rearranged minimizing the overall energy expenditure. If the repulsive force is sufficiently high, shift becomes a strong promoter of cooperation in two dimensions.},
  author       = {Pavlogiannis, Andreas and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Adlam, Ben and Nowak, Martin},
  journal      = {Scientific Reports},
  publisher    = {Nature Publishing Group},
  title        = {{Cellular cooperation with shift updating and repulsion}},
  doi          = {10.1038/srep17147},
  volume       = {5},
  year         = {2015},
}

