A Coalgebraic Approach to Reducing Finitary Automata

Abstract

Compact representations of automata are important for efficiency. In this paper, we study methods to compute reduced automata, in which no two states accept the same language. We do this for finitary automata (FA), an abstract definition that encompasses probabilistic and weighted automata. Our procedure makes use of Milius' locally finite fixpoint. We present a reduction algorithm that instantiates to probabilistic and S-linear weighted automata (WA) for a large class of semirings. Moreover, we propose a potential connection between properness of a semiring and our provided reduction algorithm for WAs, paving the way for future work in connecting the reduction of automata to the properness of their associated coalgebras.