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Lower Bounds for Active Automata Learning
Proceedings of 16th edition of the International Conference on Grammatical Inference, PMLR 217:157-180, 2023.
Abstract
We study lower bounds for the number of output and equivalence queries required for active learning of finite state machines, with a focus on L^{#}, a new learning algorithm that requires fewer queries for learning than other state-of-the-art algorithms on a large collection of benchmarks. We improve the lower bound of cite{BalcazarDG97} on the combined number of output and equivalence queries required by any learning algorithm, and give a simpler proof. We prove that in the worst case L^{#} needs n−1 equivalence queries to learn an FSM with n states, and establish lower bounds on the number of output queries needed by L^{#} in the worst case. In practical applications, the maximum length of the shortest separating sequence for all pairs of inequivalent states (MS3) is often just 1 or 2. We present L^{#}_h, a version of L^{#} with bounded lookahead h, which learns FSMs with an MS3 of at most h without requiring any equivalence queries, and give lower and upper bounds on its complexity.