Seminal results establish that the coverability problem for Vector Addition Systems with States (VASS) is in EXPSPACE (Rackoff, '78) and is EXPSPACE-hard already under unary encodings (Lipton, '76). More precisely, Rosier and Yen later utilise Rackoff’s bounding technique to show that if coverability holds then there is a run of length at most n^{2^𝒪(d log d)}, where d is the dimension and n is the size of the given unary VASS. Earlier, Lipton showed that there exist instances of coverability in d-dimensional unary VASS that are only witnessed by runs of length at least n^{2^Ω(d)}. Our first result closes this gap. We improve the upper bound by removing the twice-exponentiated log(d) factor, thus matching Lipton’s lower bound. This closes the corresponding gap for the exact space required to decide coverability. This also yields a deterministic n^{2^𝒪(d)}-time algorithm for coverability. Our second result is a matching lower bound, that there does not exist a deterministic n^{2^o(d)}-time algorithm, conditioned upon the Exponential Time Hypothesis. When analysing coverability, a standard proof technique is to consider VASS with bounded counters. Bounded VASS make for an interesting and popular model due to strong connections with timed automata. Withal, we study a natural setting where the counter bound is linear in the size of the VASS. Here the trivial exhaustive search algorithm runs in 𝒪(n^{d+1})-time. We give evidence to this being near-optimal. We prove that in dimension one this trivial algorithm is conditionally optimal, by showing that n^{2-o(1)}-time is required under the k-cycle hypothesis. In general fixed dimension d, we show that n^{d-2-o(1)}-time is required under the 3-uniform hyperclique hypothesis.
@InProceedings{kunnemann_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.131, author = {K\"{u}nnemann, Marvin and Mazowiecki, Filip and Sch\"{u}tze, Lia and Sinclair-Banks, Henry and W\k{e}grzycki, Karol}, title = {{Coverability in VASS Revisited: Improving Rackoff’s Bound to Obtain Conditional Optimality}}, booktitle = {50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023)}, pages = {131:1--131:20}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-278-5}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2023}, volume = {261}, editor = {Etessami, Kousha and Feige, Uriel and Puppis, Gabriele}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.131}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-181834}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.131}, annote = {Keywords: Vector Addition System, Coverability, Reachability, Fine-Grained Complexity, Exponential Time Hypothesis, k-Cycle Hypothesis, Hyperclique Hypothesis} }
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