Linear Temporal Logic

Also known as LTL

Overview

Linear Temporal Logic expresses requirements about how events unfold over time, such as requiring a safety condition to hold until a goal is reached. Common methods translate formulas into automata for controller synthesis, planning, and verification, while progression-based techniques track how requirements evolve during execution. Researchers also study learning specifications from demonstrations or natural language, and integrating temporal constraints into reinforcement learning and robot planning. A central challenge is balancing expressive specifications and rigorous guarantees with the computational cost of automata, while ensuring that learned or translated formulas capture their intended meaning.

Latest papers

32 papers0 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Mar 1, 2026

Incremental LTLf Synthesis

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.
Feb 21, 2026

Temporal-Logic-Aware Frontier-Based Exploration

This paper addresses the problem of temporal logic motion planning for an autonomous robot operating in an unknown environment. The objective is to enable the robot to satisfy a syntactically co-safe Linear Temporal Logic (scLTL) specification when the exact locations of the desired labels are not known a priori. We introduce a new type of automaton state, referred to as commit states. These states capture intermediate task progress resulting from actions whose consequences are irreversible. In other words, certain future paths to satisfaction become not feasible after taking those actions that lead to the commit states. By leveraging commit states, we propose a sound and complete frontier-based exploration algorithm that strategically guides the robot to make progress toward the task while preserving all possible ways of satisfying it. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated through simulations.