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Documents authored by Vahanwala, Mihir

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2023.17
Robust Positivity Problems for Linear Recurrence Sequences: The Frontiers of Decidability for Explicitly Given Neighbourhoods

Authors: Mihir Vahanwala

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 284, 43rd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2023)

Abstract
Linear Recurrence Sequences (LRS) are a fundamental mathematical primitive for a plethora of applications such as the verification of probabilistic systems, model checking, computational biology, and economics. Positivity (are all terms of the given LRS non-negative?) and Ultimate Positivity (are all but finitely many terms of the given LRS non-negative?) are important open number-theoretic decision problems. Recently, the robust versions of these problems, that ask whether the LRS is (Ultimately) Positive despite small perturbations to its initialisation, have gained attention as a means to model the imprecision that arises in practical settings. However, the state of the art is ill-equipped to reason about imprecision when its extent is explicitly specified. In this paper, we consider Robust Positivity and Ultimate Positivity problems where the neighbourhood of the initialisation, expressed in a natural and general format, is also part of the input. We contribute by proving sharp decidability results: decision procedures at orders our techniques are unable to handle for general LRS would entail significant number-theoretic breakthroughs.
Cite as

Mihir Vahanwala. Robust Positivity Problems for Linear Recurrence Sequences: The Frontiers of Decidability for Explicitly Given Neighbourhoods. In 43rd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 284, pp. 17:1-17:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

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@InProceedings{vahanwala:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2023.17,
  author =	{Vahanwala, Mihir},
  title =	{{Robust Positivity Problems for Linear Recurrence Sequences: The Frontiers of Decidability for Explicitly Given Neighbourhoods}},
  booktitle =	{43rd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2023)},
  pages =	{17:1--17:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-304-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{284},
  editor =	{Bouyer, Patricia and Srinivasan, Srikanth},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2023.17},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-193909},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2023.17},
  annote =	{Keywords: Dynamical Systems, Verification, Robustness, Linear Recurrence Sequences, Positivity, Ultimate Positivity}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2022.5
On Robustness for the Skolem and Positivity Problems

Authors: S. Akshay, Hugo Bazille, Blaise Genest, and Mihir Vahanwala

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 219, 39th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2022)

Abstract
The Skolem problem is a long-standing open problem in linear dynamical systems: can a linear recurrence sequence (LRS) ever reach 0 from a given initial configuration? Similarly, the positivity problem asks whether the LRS stays positive from an initial configuration. Deciding Skolem (or positivity) has been open for half a century: The best known decidability results are for LRS with special properties (e.g., low order recurrences). On the other hand, these problems are much easier for "uninitialized" variants, where the initial configuration is not fixed but can vary arbitrarily: checking if there is an initial configuration from which the LRS stays positive can be decided by polynomial time algorithms (Tiwari in 2004, Braverman in 2006). In this paper, we consider problems that lie between the initialized and uninitialized variant. More precisely, we ask if 0 (resp. negative numbers) can be avoided from every initial configuration in a neighborhood of a given initial configuration. This can be considered as a robust variant of the Skolem (resp. positivity) problem. We show that these problems lie at the frontier of decidability: if the neighborhood is given as part of the input, then robust Skolem and robust positivity are Diophantine-hard, i.e., solving either would entail major breakthrough in Diophantine approximations, as happens for (non-robust) positivity. Interestingly, this is the first Diophantine-hardness result on a variant of the Skolem problem, to the best of our knowledge. On the other hand, if one asks whether such a neighborhood exists, then the problems turn out to be decidable in their full generality, with PSPACE complexity. Our analysis is based on the set of initial configurations such that positivity holds, which leads to new insights into these difficult problems, and interesting geometrical interpretations.
Cite as

S. Akshay, Hugo Bazille, Blaise Genest, and Mihir Vahanwala. On Robustness for the Skolem and Positivity Problems. In 39th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 219, pp. 5:1-5:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)

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@InProceedings{akshay_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2022.5,
  author =	{Akshay, S. and Bazille, Hugo and Genest, Blaise and Vahanwala, Mihir},
  title =	{{On Robustness for the Skolem and Positivity Problems}},
  booktitle =	{39th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2022)},
  pages =	{5:1--5:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-222-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2022},
  volume =	{219},
  editor =	{Berenbrink, Petra and Monmege, Benjamin},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2022.5},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-158156},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2022.5},
  annote =	{Keywords: Skolem problem, verification, dynamical systems, robustness}
}
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