arXiv subjects

Tansholpan Zhanabekova

Publications and source records attributed to Tansholpan Zhanabekova.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

On Good-for-MDPs Automata

Nondeterministic good-for-MDPs (GFM) automata are for MDP model checking and reinforcement learning what good-for-games (GFG) automata are for reactive synthesis: a more compact alternative to deterministic automata that displays nondeterminism, but only so much that it can be resolved locally, such that a syntactic product can be analysed. GFM has recently been introduced as a property for reinforcement learning, where the simpler Büchi acceptance conditions it allows to use is key. However, while there are classic and novel techniques to obtain automata that are GFM, there has not been a decision procedure for checking whether or not an automaton is GFM. We show that GFM-ness is decidable and provide an EXPTIME decision procedure as well as a PSPACE-hardness proof. We also compare the succinctness of GFM automata with other types of automata with restricted nondeterminism. The first natural comparison point are GFG automata. Deterministic automata are GFG, and GFG automata are GFM, but not vice versa. This raises the question of how these classes relate in terms of succinctness. GFG automata are known to be exponentially more succinct than deterministic automata, but the gap between GFM and GFG automata as well as the gap between ordinary nondeterministic automata and those that are GFM have been open. We establish that these gaps are exponential, and sharpen this result by showing that the latter gap remains exponential when restricting the nondeterministic automata to separating safety or unambiguous reachability automata.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2026

Generalised Reachability Games

We study two-player zero-sum turn-based games played on graphs with multiple reachability objectives called generalised reachability games. In classic reachability games the goal of one player, Eve, is to visit a given target set of vertices, and that of the other player, Adam, is to prevent this. In generalised reachability games, the single target set is replaced with a family of target sets and the objective of Eve is to visit all of them in any order. We study the complexity of deciding the winner in two-player games with generalised reachability objectives. Our study reveals that an important parameter that determines the complexity of this problem is the size of the target sets. We first prove that deciding the winner in such games is PSPACE-complete, and the PSPACE lower bound holds even when the size of each target set is at most three. By contrast, we show that the problem is FPT in the number of target sets of size greater than one. Moreover, we consider the memory requirements for both players and give matching upper and lower bounds on the sizes of winning strategies. We also study optimisation variants of these games. For the optimisation problems, we show intractability for most interesting cases. Particularly, in contrast to the tractability of generalised reachability in the case with singleton target sets, the optimisation problem is coNP-hard when Eve tries to maximise the number of target sets that are visited. Tractability of this case can be recovered in a different optimisation setting where Eve is required to pledge a maximum sized subset of target sets that she can guarantee to visit.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2025

Generalised Reachability Games Revisited

Classic reachability games on graphs are zero-sum games, where the goal of one player, Eve, is to visit a vertex from a given target set, and that of other player, Adam, is to prevent this. Generalised reachability games, studied by Fijalkow and Horn, are a generalisation of reachability objectives, where instead of a single target set, there is a family of target sets and Eve must visit all of them in any order. In this work, we further study the complexity of solving two-player games on graphs with generalised reachability objectives. Our results are twofold: first, we provide an improved complexity picture for generalised reachability games, expanding the known tractable class from games in which all target sets are singleton to additionally allowing a logarithmic number of target sets of arbitrary size. Second, we study optimisation variants of generalised reachability with a focus on the size of the target sets. For these problems, we show intractability for most interesting cases. Particularly, in contrast to the tractability in the classic variant for singleton target sets, the optimisation problem is NP-hard when Eve tries to maximise the number of singleton target sets that are visited. Tractability can be recovered in the optimisation setting when all target sets are singleton by requiring that Eve pledges a maximum sized subset of target sets that she can guarantee to visit.

cs.GT↗