Alexandra Silva: "Learning Weighted Automata over Principal Ideal Domains"

Topos Institute Colloquium, 19th of May 2022. ——— In the first part of this talk, we discuss active learning algorithms for weighted automata over a semiring. We show that a variant of Angluin's seminal L* algorithm works when the semiring is a principal ideal domain, but not for general semirings such as the natural numbers. In the second part, we present some preliminary work on active learning for probabilistic automata, and in particular discuss what the setup of the problem looks like and how that leads (or not) to impossibility results.