Tree Automata Acceptance up to Measurable Defect

Abstract: Automata acceptance can, in several situations of interest, be captured game-theoretically via acceptance games. The existence of a winning strategy for Verifier then captures the existence of a winning run-tree of a given automaton over a model. However, such acceptance is rigid, in that it does not allow a measurable defect budget, which can be a challenge in software verification. In this paper, we draw inspiration from how bisimulation distance can be defined as an extension of bisimilarity to define epsilon-acceptance games. Our main theorem shows that a tree T is epsilon-accepted iff there is a tree T' that is accepted in the traditional (rigid) sense and the bisimulation distance of T' and T is at most epsilon. Our work also suggests a strong connection with measure theory, of which we give a preliminary exploration via appropriate examples. Our framework is defined over binary trees with leaves and infinite branches, and strictly contains the case in which binary nodes are seen as probabilistic choice and the defect measures the probability of the set of rejected branches.