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String Rewriting Systems: Brief Introduction and Sample of Open Problems

This document is the result of pulling together small parts of different lecture notes I have written over several decades for first-year graduate-level courses -- typically with the title Formal Methods -- which included many other topics of mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. After combining these materials, I updated the references and adjusted the text to account for progress accomplished in the intervening years. The sample of open problems in the last section is a small collection of special cases that are still unresolved up until the date of this writing.

cs.LO↗

Walking on the DARKSIDE

Large Language Models (LLMs) do not natively track the path of exclusions that a coherent discourse demands. When an input rests on a fabricated authority, a misapplied mechanism, or a surreptitious analogy, an unsteered LLM tends to engage with it as if it were well-posed, and this affects its generation. POLANYI++, an LLM-steering method that uses heuristics, ontologies and problem-solving methods for tacit-knowledge extraction, produces an Extended Knowledge Graph (XKG) in OWL2, but when a sophisticated nonsensical input is reified into the graph alongside the legitimate triples, it gets hardly detectable by automated reasoners, since the XKG is generated jointly with the wrong assumptions. We introduce DARKSIDE, a coherence-auditing method on top of POLANYI++. DARKSIDE formalises an explicit data structure of accumulated exclusions over discourse time, complemented by a warrant axis that classifies each named referent as Warranted, Unattested, Misattributed or Fabricated. The method is anchored in nine theoretical fragments unified under a shared deep frame of path integrity. The resulting DARKPOLANYI is evaluated as a steering layer over Gemini 3 on BSBench, a 100-item adversarial corpus of sophisticated-sounding nonsense across multiple domains, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 as an independent judge. DARKPOLANYI scores 1.89/2 mean versus 0.95/2 for the unsteered Gemini 3 Pro baseline; on the 97 cases with valid judgments in both arms, paired McNemar gives a paired bootstrap mean-diff = +0.92 (95% CI [+0.75, +1.08], p = 0.0001). The evidence supports an architectural claim: when an LLM forward pass is wrapped in an ontology-mediated auditing, structurally inevitable hallucination can be partially recovered. The XKG functions as the missing memory that LLMs lack, and the warrant axis as an epistemic firewall.

cs.AI↗

From Ramsey-Based to Congruence-Based Constructions for Büchi Complementation

The very first construction by J. Richard Büchi himself for complementing a Büchi automaton relies on a fundamental lemma about the division of an arbitrary infinite word into consecutive finite words, which was cleanly proven by invoking a specialized theorem of Ramsey. For that reason, constructions of similar nature have subsequently been labeled as Ramsey-based. Nevertheless, it suffices to have a weaker form of the lemma where the finite words come from a finite number of congruence classes, rather than arbitrary classes, that form a partition of the set of all finite words. The weaker lemma, with support of nicer properties from a congruence, can be proven without Ramsey's theorem. A commonly adopted improvement on such complementation constructions also requires the working of a congruence. This paper recounts the history and reviews using more contemporary terminology wherever possible the relevant concepts and results, to advocate renaming of Ramsey-based constructions as congruence-based constructions.

cs.FL↗

Differentiable Horn Programs: A Constructive Expressivity Theorem for Latent Rule Operators

We introduce \textsc{LatentGamma}, a differentiable operator on the unit cube $[0,1]^M$ designed as a smooth surrogate of Tarski's immediate consequence operator $\TP$ associated with a definite Horn program $P$ on $M$ atoms. The operator is built as a five-stage composition combining sigmoidal gating, softmax routing, and a residual update that enforces monotonicity by construction. We establish four theoretical results. First, the iterated sequence is coordinate-wise non-decreasing and bounded by $\ind$, hence converges to a fixed point of \textsc{LatentGamma}; the operator itself is lattice-monotone on $[0,1]^M$. Second, our \emph{constructive expressivity theorem} shows that for every definite Horn program $P$ there exists a closed-form parameter assignment $θ^*(P)$ and an explicit time bound $T_{\max}(P)$ such that the iterated sequence \emph{exactly} reproduces $\TPinf(F_0)$ for every initial fact set $F_0$ throughout the window $[D(P, F_0), T_{\max}(P)]$, where $D(P, F_0) \leq M$ is the derivation depth. The window $T_{\max}$ is large in practice ($\geq 10^5$ for sparse programs) and reflects the finite-time nature of computation by smooth sigmoidal gates. Third, the oracle is robust to Gaussian noise on its body and head logits, with explicit non-asymptotic bounds. Fourth, we prove a matching information-theoretic lower bound on the parameter count. We provide a complete numerical validation on programs ranging from $M = 33$ to $M = 504$ atoms: oracle accuracy reaches $1.0000$ on $2000$ test cases with zero false-positive and false-negative rates, and the empirical noise tolerance $σ_{\max}$ scales precisely as the union bound $RM \cdot Φ(-10/σ_η)$ predicts.

cs.LO↗

A characterization of efficiently compilable constraint languages

A central task in knowledge compilation is to compile a CNF-SAT instance into a succinct representation format that allows efficient operations such as testing satisfiability, counting, or enumerating all solutions. Useful representation formats studied in this area range from ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) to circuits in decomposable negation normal form (DNNFs). While it is known that there exist CNF formulas that require exponential size representations, the situation is less well studied for other types of constraints than Boolean disjunctive clauses. The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a powerful framework that generalizes CNF-SAT by allowing arbitrary sets of constraints over any finite domain. The main goal of our work is to understand for which type of constraints (also called the constraint language) it is possible to efficiently compute representations of polynomial size. We answer this question completely and prove two tight characterizations of efficiently compilable constraint languages, depending on whether target format is structured. We first identify the combinatorial property of ``strong blockwise decomposability'' and show that if a constraint language has this property, we can compute DNNF representations of linear size. For all other constraint languages we construct families of CSP-instances that provably require DNNFs of exponential size. For a subclass of ``strong uniformly blockwise decomposable'' constraint languages we obtain a similar dichotomy for structured DNNFs. In fact, strong (uniform) blockwise decomposability even allows efficient compilation into multi-valued analogs of OBDDs and FBDDs, respectively. Thus, we get complete characterizations for all knowledge compilation classes between O(B)DDs and DNNFs.

cs.LO↗

Antichains for Concurrent Parameterized Games (Long Version)

Concurrent parameterized games involve a fixed yet arbitrary number of players. They are described by finite arenas in which the edges are labeled with languages that describe the possible move combinations leading from one vertex to another (n players yield a word of length n). Previous work showed that, when edge labels are regular languages, one can decide whether a distinguished player, called Eve, has a strategy to ensure a reachability objective, against any strategy profile of her arbitrarily many opponents. This decision problem is known to be PSPACE-complete. A basic ingredient in the PSPACE-membership proof is the reduction to the exponential-size knowledge game, a 2-player game that reflects the knowledge Eve has on the number of opponents. In this paper, we provide a symbolic approach, based on antichains, to compute Eve's winning region in the knowledge game. In words, it gives the minimal knowledge Eve needs at every vertex to win the concurrent parameterized reachability game. More precisely, we propose two fixed-point algorithms that compute, as an antichain, the maximal elements of the winning region for Eve in the knowledge game. We implemented these two algorithms in C++, as well as the one initially proposed, and report on their relative performances on various benchmarks.

cs.LO↗

Examples and counterexamples of injective types

It is known that, in univalent mathematics, type universes, the type of $n$-types in a universe, reflective subuniverses, and the underlying type of any algebra of the lifting monad are all (algebraically) injective. Here, we further show that the type of ordinals, the type of iterative (multi)sets, the underlying type of any pointed directed complete poset, as well as the types of (small) $\infty$-magmas, monoids, and groups are all injective, among other examples. Not all types of mathematical structures are injective in general. For example, the type of inhabited types is injective if and only if all propositions are projective. In contrast, the type of pointed types and the type of non-empty types are always injective. The injectivity of the type of two-element types implies Fourman and Ščedrov's world's simplest axiom of choice. We also show that there are no nontrivial small injective types unless a weak propositional resizing principle holds. Other counterexamples include the type of booleans, the simple types, the type of Dedekind reals, and the type of conatural numbers, whose injectivity implies weak excluded middle. More generally, any type with an apartness relation and two points apart cannot be injective unless weak excluded middle holds. Finally, we show that injective types have no non-trivial decidable properties, unless weak excluded middle holds, which amounts to a Rice-like theorem for injective types.

math.LO↗

Coexact completion of profinite Heyting algebras and uniform interpolation

This paper shows that the sheaf representation of finitely generated free Heyting algebras constructed by Ghilardi and Zawadowski can be factored as the profinite completion of Heyting algebras, followed by identifying the dual category of profinite Heyting algebras as a full subcategory of a sheaf topos. We show that the dual category of profinite Heyting algebras is an infinitary extensive regular category, and its ex/reg-completion is exactly the aforementioned sheaf topos, which we refer to as the K-topos. We show how certain properties of uniform interpolation can be generalised to the context of arbitrary profinite Heyting algebras, and that they are consequences of the internal logic of the K-topos. Along the way we also establish various topos-theoretic properties of the K-topos.

math.LO↗

Revisiting average case complexity of multilevel syllogistic

We describe a Lean~4 formalization revisiting NYU Courant Technical Report TR1995-711 on the average-case complexity of Multilevel Syllogistic (MLS). The development encodes Reischuk--Schindelhauer average-case classes, an axiomatic MLS/EMLS semantics layer, a partial Ferro--Omodeo--Schwartz decision procedure with proved soundness and partial completeness on a membership-free fragment, serialization and step budgets, and conditional NP-average completeness and non-AvP hardness corollaries modulo explicitly documented structural axioms. Full Lean sources are inlined in the appendix modules.

cs.LO↗

A Computational Obstruction to Swapping Area and Dinv: An Automata-Theoretic View of the $q,t$-Catalan Symmetry

Algebraic combinatorics often seeks bijections that explain identities between distributions object by object. Encoding combinatorial objects as words lets automata theory study such a bijection as a word-to-word computation and measure its memory, input access, and control of output order. This refines existence questions by asking which computational mechanisms a bijection requires. We develop this viewpoint for Dyck paths. Our motivating example is the $q,t$-Catalan polynomial. Let $D_n$ be the set of Dyck paths of semilength $n$, let $D=\bigcup_{n\ge 0}D_n$, and let $area, dinv, bounce \colon D\to\mathbb{N}$ be the standard statistics. Then, \[ C_n(q,t)=\sum_{P\in D_n}q^{area(P)}t^{bounce(P)} =\sum_{P\in D_n}q^{dinv(P)}t^{area(P)}. \] Haglund's zeta map $ζ\colon D\to D$ gives a bijective proof: it preserves semilength and sends $(dinv,area)$ to $(area,bounce)$. By contrast, the full symmetry $C_n(q,t)=C_n(t,q)$ still lacks a direct explanation: no explicit, uniform, semilength-preserving bijection is known that swaps area and dinv on every Dyck path. Polyregular maps from automata theory provide a natural computational starting point, but we prove that neither $ζ$ nor the classical height-sweep bijection witnessing Narayana symmetry is polyregular. The missing mechanism is global ordering by numerical levels whose range grows with the input. We call this a \emph{rank sort} and introduce \emph{weighted-rank polyregular maps} (WRP), extending polyregular maps by one such sort and containing both bijections. Nevertheless, WRP is a proper subclass of deterministic logspace. We prove that $ζ^{-1}$ lies outside WRP and that no WRP map can realise a semilength-preserving area-dinv swap. Thus the rank-sorting strategy behind $ζ$ cannot be extended within WRP to exchange the two statistics.

math.CO↗

AxQM: A Textbook-Scale Benchmark for Formal Proof Synthesis in a Library of Finite-Dimensional Quantum Mechanics

Formalizing mathematics in a proof assistant, where a machine checks every definition, statement and proof, has set a new standard of rigor. Large language models are now capable of formalizing autonomously, even at the scale of whole textbooks. We bring this standard of rigor to physics, where theoretical arguments carry idealizations that are rarely stated fully, and any logical gaps could have a cascading effect on interdependent results. Recognizing the need to evaluate autoformalization systems for physics, we release AxQM, 1,019 kernel-checkable proof-synthesis tasks over 479 items drawn from the textbook Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. The tasks are stated in a custom Lean library of finite-dimensional quantum mechanics. By task count, it is the largest proof-synthesis benchmark in physics by a factor of four. AxQM is derived from a near-complete formalization of the formal portions of the textbook, so every task is guaranteed a solution, which we keep private. Grading of the benchmark is done deterministically by the Lean kernel, which checks that the proof compiles, that no sorry appears in it or in any declaration it depends on, and that it introduces no new axioms.

quant-ph↗

Deriving Program Logics from Distributive Monoidal Categories

We derive multiple program logics - including correctness, incorrectness, and relational Hoare logic - from the axioms of imperative categories: uniformly traced distributive copy-discard categories. Rules of program logics follow from the axioms of imperative categories. The algebra of guarded commands derived by the categorical structure generalises guarded Kleene algebras with tests.

cs.LO↗

Univalence without function extensionality

It is a well-known theorem of homotopy type theory, originally due to Voevodsky, that function extensionality holds inside any univalent universe. We consider a weaker variant of the univalence axiom, asserting that the wild category formed by the universe is univalent, which we call categorical univalence. We show that categorical univalence does not imply function extensionality by an analysis of Von Glehn's polynomial model construction, which produces models of Martin-Löf type theory that always refute function extensionality. We find in particular that when the base model has a univalent universe, its polynomial model has a universe that is categorically univalent but lacks function extensionality.

cs.LO↗

Set-like operations on propositional logic programs

Composition and decomposition of logic programs have been studied extensively in the context of modularity, and decomposing a program along the dependency structure of its atoms --- by strata or strongly connected components in datalog, and by splitting sets in the non-monotonic setting of answer set programming --- is standard practice. All of these approaches operate on the level of rule sets: programs are cut along dependencies between atoms, while the internal structure of the individual rules remains untouched. In this paper, we complement this picture by a finer-grained algebra. We introduce set-like operations on (propositional Horn) logic programs --- body-union, body-intersection, body-complement, body-subtraction, body-symmetric-difference, and body-power-set --- which manipulate rule bodies in analogy to the corresponding set operations, and we study their algebraic laws and their interaction with sequential composition and the least model semantics. Our main technical result is a decomposition theorem in this algebra: every minimalist program --- containing at most one rule for each rule head --- is the body-union of Krom programs consisting only of rules with at most one body atom, in such a way that its least model is the intersection of the least models of these components; for arbitrary programs we obtain corresponding approximations. Since Krom programs are algebraically better behaved than arbitrary programs --- composition is associative and distributes from the left --- this may support decomposition-based reasoning and provides a basis for compositional program construction.

cs.LO↗

Accountable AI with Grounded, Faithful, Consistent, Actionable Rationales: A Case Study in Clinical Trial Matching with VERDICT

Accountability means a decision can be examined, justified, and contested. LLMs make this hard: fluent output may be ungrounded, incomplete, or unfaithful to the decision process. Achieving accountability requires verified rationales (how was the decision reached), assumptions (what was assumed rather than known), policy consistency (the same treatment for the same facts), and pivotal conditions (what would change the outcome). We introduce self-faithfulness as an automatic test of accountability: changing the pivotal conditions should change the decision. We examine accountable AI through clinical trial matching, a high-stakes task central to evidence-based medicine. Although LLM-based matchers match patients to trials reasonably accurately, they apply decision policies inconsistently and produce rationales that are unfaithful to their own decisions. We introduce VERDICT, an LLM-based agent that translates a decision task, its constraints, and its policy into Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), then derives the decision with SMT and MaxSMT solvers -- so policies are applied consistently and decisions are accountable by construction. Across a SIGIR 2016-derived dataset and TREC 2021, VERDICT achieves the strongest decision accuracy among LLM-only and neurosymbolic baselines, applies policies with perfect consistency, and produces clinician-preferred rationales grounded in explicit assumptions and pivotal conditions, with improved counterfactual self-faithfulness.

cs.CL↗

Override and Update in Restriction Categories

We study the override and update operators on partial functions from the perspective of restriction categories. We propose a definition of override restriction categories, in which both of the operators in question exist. We prove a number of results concerning these operators and their relationship to the structure of the ambient restriction category, as well as relating them to the existing literature on the override and update operators. We provide various examples of override restriction categories and in particular show that every classical restriction category is an override restriction category.

math.CT↗

AutoGraphForge: Towards Automated Graph Theory Discovery

We report on our ongoing project to develop a computational pipeline, AutoGraphForge, for an automated graph-theoretic conjecturing-refuting-formalizing-proving system. Conjecture generation is counterexample-guided and runs in rounds: a Graffiti3 generator proposes conjectures over a small, evolving snapshot table $T$ (initially a few hundred graphs with their computed invariants) that grows only by counterexamples to its own conjectures. A novelty filter of $559$ classical and folklore relations, closed under transitive composition and linear identity substitution, decides via a linear program whether a candidate is already implied by known results. Surviving candidates are tested against a dataset of about $348,000$ graphs, unioning the complete House of Graphs invariant export, the exhaustive census of all connected graphs on at most nine vertices, several extremal families (strongly regular, minimal Ramsey, Cayley, cages, barbells, lollipops, spiders), and random models. Counterexample-search algorithms then attack the remainder. Run for several rounds on an HPC cluster, the loop yields $6,522$ conjectures that survived the refutation dataset, the novelty filter and every active-search run -- among them nontrivial relations between the annihilation number and the edge-cover number for bipartite and regular graphs, which we prove by hand. A subsequent formalization and proving stage deterministically translates each surviving conjecture into a Lean 4 statement skeleton; every candidate proof is kernel-verified against a pinned mathlib4 and our custom invariant preamble. This stage integrates two neural provers -- DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B (served with vLLM) and the Lean-specialised OProver-32B -- behind the independent kernel check. It is implemented end-to-end and passes initial sanity checks, with the full pipeline currently running on the cluster.

cs.AI↗

Predictive Zonotope Reduction: Precise Runtime Monitoring under Uncertainty

Robots operating in physical environments make control decisions based on uncertain sensor measurements, which can lead to unsafe or suboptimal actions. Runtime monitors that check their behavior against safety specifications must represent this uncertainty soundly. Zonotopes are a widely used representation, but continuously incorporating new measurements grows their order unboundedly, so monitors must periodically apply an over-approximating reduction. The choice of the reduction method substantially affects the zonotope's precision, yet existing approaches typically utilize a fixed method throughout the run, even though the optimal choice depends on the current state. This paper presents a Predictive Zonotope Reduction (PZR) approach, which frames reducer selection as an optimal control problem and solves it using beam-search model predictive control. Policy distillation into a small neural policy further provides substantially higher execution speed than model predictive control while maintaining improved performance, enabling uncertainty-aware runtime monitoring on resource-constrained real-time systems. We implement our approach in the RLola runtime monitoring framework and evaluate it on a 5-degree-of-freedom robotic arm simulated in MuJoCo, with sensor uncertainty modeled according to ISO 5725. Experiments on a Raspberry Pi 5 show that dynamic reduction significantly lowers false-positive rates in monitoring compared with static reduction strategies.

cs.RO↗