Regular Separability for Bidirected VASS

Abstract

The regular separability problem asks, given two languages, whether there exists a regular language that contains one of them and is disjoint from the other. We study regular separability for bidirected VASS. We first show that the problem remains Ackermann-complete when the input consists of two languages recognised by bidrected VASS. To find a subclass of VASS in which the problem has lower complexity we define alphabetically bidirected VASS as ones where bidirectedness is also visible in the input letters. Our main result establishes that regular separability for alphabetically bidirected VASS is EXPSPACE-complete. The key to this result is that, in this setting, regular separability coincides with disjointness. As a first ingredient in this equivalence, we also show that for alphabetically bidirected Z-VASS, regular separability and disjointness are equivalent. Consequently, regular separability for these systems is in polynomial-time. In fact, it is log-space inter-reducible with non-solvability of integer linear Diophantine equation systems. Finally, we observe that the picture changes dramatically in the presence of a zero test, namely, we show that regular separability for alphabetically bidirected one-counter automata is undecidable.