Two-way cost automata and cost logics over infinite trees

Abstract

Regular cost functions provide a quantitative extension of regular languages that retains most of their important properties, such as expressive power and decidability, at least over finite and infinite words and over finite trees. Much less is known over infinite trees. We consider cost functions over infinite trees defined by an extension of weak monadic second-order logic with a new fixed-point-like operator. We show this logic to be decidable, improving previously known decidability results for cost logics over infinite trees. The proof relies on an equivalence with a form of automata with counters called quasi-weak cost automata, as well as results about converting two-way alternating cost automata to one-way alternating cost automata.