In this paper, we study incremental LTLf synthesis -- a form of reactive synthesis where the goals are given incrementally while in execution. In other words, the protagonist agent is already executing a strategy for a certain goal when it receives a new goal: at this point, the agent has to abandon the current strategy and synthesize a new strategy still fulfilling the original goal, which was given at the beginning, as well as the new goal, starting from the current instant. In this paper, we formally define the problem of incremental synthesis and study its solution. We propose a solution technique that efficiently performs incremental synthesis for multiple LTLf goals by leveraging auxiliary data structures constructed during automata-based synthesis. We also consider an alternative solution technique based on LTLf formula progression. We show that, in spite of the fact that formula progression can generate formulas that are exponentially larger than the original ones, their minimal automata remain bounded in size by that of the original formula. On the other hand, we show experimentally that, if implemented naively, i.e., by actually computing the automaton of the progressed LTLf formulas from scratch every time a new goal arrives, the solution based on formula progression is not competitive.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Relation between ltl f progression and dfa progression through a history h
Instance
Added Goals
Avg. Runtime (s)
isabel - dp
isabel - fp
isabel - dp
isabel - fp
plants -1
30 /30
19/30
9.12
155.12
plants -2
25 /30
16/30
15.68
172.00
plants -3
22 /30
14/30
18.70
179.43
plants -4
20 /30
13/30
19.60
173.17
plants -5
19 /30
12/30
29.94
265.45
Table 1: Comparison of the number of goals added and average time to add a goal achieved by isabel - dp and isabel - fp . Results of the best-performing implementation in bold.
Figure 2: From top to bottom, left to right, time required by isabel - dp and isabel - fp (in log scale) to add new goals in instances tireworld - 1 to tireworld - 10 .
Figure 3: From top to bottom, left to right, time required by isabel - dp and isabel - fp (in log scale) to add new goals in instances counter - 6 to counter - 8 .
Figure 4: From top to bottom, left to right, time required by isabel - dp and isabel - fp (in log scale) to add new goals in instances plants - 1 to plants - 10 .
Figure 5: From top to bottom, left to right, time required by isabel - dp and isabel - fp (in log scale) to add new goals in instances requests - 1 - 1 to requests - 3 - 4 .
Strategy synthesis typically follows an all-or-nothing paradigm, returning unrealisable whenever a specification cannot be guaranteed in an uncertain environment. In this paper, we introduce optimal LTLf synthesis, where the goal is to realise as many objectives as possible from a given specification consisting of multiple objectives, especially for the case that they are not all jointly realisable. We first consider max-guarantee synthesis, which commits to a maximal set of objectives that we can a priori guarantee to realise. We then introduce max-observation synthesis, which maximises a posteriori realised objectives that may be incomparable on different executions. Finally, we present incremental max-observation synthesis, which further improves strategies by exploiting opportunities for stronger guarantees when they arise during an execution. Experimental results show that different variations of optimal synthesis scale broadly equally well, solving a large fraction of the benchmark instances within the given timeout, demonstrating the practical feasibility of the approach.
Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is one of the most widely adopted languages for specifying temporal extended objectives in AI, with applications ranging from reactive synthesis to stochastic planning in Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning. Traditionally, solving any of these problems requires translating the LTL specification to a nondeterministic automata on infinite words and then determinizing it, a step that is notoriously difficult in theory and in practice. Recent work has introduced LTLf+, which lifts the finite-trace logic LTLf to infinite traces. LTLf+ has the same expressive power as LTL, yet it retains most of the crucial advantages of its base logic LTLf. Most reasoning in LTLf+ rests on finite automata on finite words, for which we have not only a canonical minimal representation but also an efficient determinization procedure. In this work we present the first translation from LTL to LTLf+. We first normalize an LTL formula into the syntactic reactivity fragment of the Manna-Pnueli hierarchy, to create the general fragment-based shape of LTLf+. We then present linear translations for each individual component of that fragment. As a consequence of this translation, the expanding body of techniques developed for LTLf+ now becomes available to many AI problems currently formulated in LTL. We further show that this comes at no asymptotic cost, as the pipeline from LTL to automaton via LTLf+ remains doubly exponential.
Christoph Weinhuber, Maximilian Prokop, Giuseppe De Giacomo +1
University of Oxford · 2Technical University of Munich · 3Masaryk University Brno +1
Synthesizing a reactive system from specifications given in linear temporal logic (LTL) is a classical problem, finding its applications in safety-critical systems design. These systems are typically represented using either Mealy machines or AIGER circuits. We present the second version of SemML, which outperforms all state-of-the-art tools for finding either solution. Aside from implementing the classical automata-theoretic approach, our tool utilizes partial exploration and machine-learning guidance for obtaining solutions efficiently, and numerous heuristics and improvements of classic algorithms for extracting small representations of these solutions. We evaluate our tool against the existing state-of-the-art tools (in particular Strix, LtlSynt, and the previous version of SemML) on the dataset of the synthesis competition SYNTCOMP. We show that we solve significantly more instances and do so much faster than other tools, while maintaining state-of-the-art solution quality.
Jan Křetínský, Tobias Meggendorfer, Maximilian Prokop
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic · Technical University of Munich, Germany · Lancaster University Leipzig, Germany