Monadic Second-Order Logic and Bisimulation Invariance for Coalgebras

TL;DR

This paper extends monadic second-order logic to coalgebras, explores automata translations, and investigates bisimulation invariance, providing new proofs and insights for various functors and modal logics.

Contribution

It introduces a coalgebraic monadic second-order logic framework, establishes automata translations, and characterizes bisimulation invariance for complex functors, including new results for the monotone neighborhood functor.

Findings

Automata translation for coalgebraic MSO logic over tree-like frames

Bisimulation invariance results for bag functor and exponential polynomial functors

Characterization of the monotone modal mu-calculus with global modalities

Abstract

Generalizing standard monadic second-order logic for Kripke models, we introduce monadic second-order logic interpreted over coalgebras for an arbitrary set functor. Similar to well-known results for monadic second-order logic over trees, we provide a translation of this logic into a class of automata, relative to the class of coalgebras that admit a tree-like supporting Kripke frame. We then consider invariance under behavioral equivalence of formulas; more in particular, we investigate whether the coalgebraic mu-calculus is the bisimulation-invariant fragment of monadic second-order logic. Building on recent results by the third author we show that in order to provide such a coalgebraic generalization of the Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem, it suffices to find what we call an adequate uniform construction for the functor. As applications of this result we obtain a partly new proof of the Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem, and bisimulation invariance results for the bag functor (graded modal logic) and all exponential polynomial functors. Finally, we consider in some detail the monotone neighborhood functor, which provides coalgebraic semantics for monotone modal logic. It turns out that there is no adequate uniform construction for this functor, whence the automata-theoretic approach towards bisimulation invariance does not apply directly. This problem can be overcome if we consider global bisimulations between neighborhood models: one of our main technical results provides a characterization of the monotone modal mu-calculus extended with the global modalities, as the fragment of monadic second-order logic for the monotone neighborhood functor that is invariant for global bisimulations.