Behavioural distances provide a quantitative approach to comparing the states of transition systems, moving beyond traditional Boolean notions of equivalence. In this paper, we develop a sound and complete axiomatisation of behavioural distance for nondeterministic processes using Milner’s charts, a model that generalises finite-state automata by incorporating variable outputs. Charts provide a compelling setting for studying behavioural distances because they shift the focus from language equivalence to bisimilarity. Their axiomatic study lays the groundwork for quantitative analysis of more expressive models, such as weighted transition systems. To formalise this approach, we adopt string diagrams as our syntax of choice. String diagrams closely mirror the graphical structure of charts, while providing a rigorous formalism that supports inductive reasoning and compositional semantics. Unlike traditional algebraic syntaxes, which require additional mechanisms such as binders and substitution, string diagrams offer a variable-free representation where recursion naturally decomposes into simpler components. This makes them well-suited for reasoning about behavioural distances and aligns with broader efforts to axiomatise automata-theoretic equivalences through a unified diagrammatic framework.

We propose Weighted Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests (wGKAT), an uninterpreted weighted programming language equipped with branching, conditionals, and loops. We provide an operational semantics for wGKAT using a variant of weighted automata and introduce a sound and complete axiomatization. We also provide a polynomial time decision procedure for bisimulation equivalence.

String diagrammatic calculi have become increasingly popular in fields such as quantum theory, circuit theory, probabilistic programming, and machine learning, where they enable resource-sensitive and compositional algebraic analysis.Traditionally, the equations of diagrammatic calculi only axiomatise exact semantic equality.However, reasoning in these domains often involves approximations rather than strict equivalences.In this work, we develop a quantitative framework for diagrammatic calculi, where one may axiomatise notions of distance between string diagrams.Unlike similar approaches, such as the quantitative theories introduced by Mardare et al., this requires us to work in a monoidal rather than a cartesian setting.We define a suitable notion of monoidal theory, the syntactic category it freely generates, and its models, where the concept of distance is established via enrichment over a quantale.To illustrate the framework, we provide examples from probabilistic and linear systems analysis.

Behavioural distances of transition systems modelled via coalgebras for endofunctors generalize traditional notions of behavioural equivalence to a quantitative setting, in which states are equipped with a measure of how (dis)similar they are. Endowing transition systems with such distances essentially relies on the ability to lift functors describing the one-step behavior of the transition systems to the category of pseudometric spaces. We consider the category theoretic generalization of the Kantorovich lifting from transportation theory to the case of lifting functors to quantale-valued relations, which subsumes equivalences, preorders and (directed) metrics. We use tools from fibred category theory, which allow one to see the Kantorovich lifting as arising from an appropriate fibred adjunction. Our main contributions are compositionality results for the Kantorovich lifting, where we show that that the lifting of a composed functor coincides with the composition of the liftings. In addition, we describe how to lift distributive laws in the case where one of the two functors is polynomial (with finite coproducts). These results are essential ingredients for adapting up-to-techniques to the case of quantale-valued behavioural distances. Up-to techniques are a well-known coinductive technique for efficiently showing lower bounds for behavioural distances. We illustrate the results of our paper in two case studies.

Deterministic automata have been traditionally studied through the point of view of language equivalence, but another perspective is given by the canonical notion of shortest-distinguishing-word distance quantifying the of states. Intuitively, the longer the word needed to observe a difference between two states, then the closer their behaviour is. In this paper, we give a sound and complete axiomatisation of shortest-distinguishing-word distance between regular languages. Our axiomatisation relies on a recently developed quantitative analogue of equational logic, allowing to manipulate rational-indexed judgements of the form $e \equiv_\varepsilon f$ meaning term $e$ is approximately equivalent to term $f$ within the error margin of $\varepsilon$. The technical core of the paper is dedicated to the completeness argument that draws techniques from order theory and Banach spaces to simplify the calculation of the behavioural distance to the point it can be then mimicked by axiomatic reasoning.

We introduce Probabilistic Regular Expressions (PRE), a probabilistic analogue of regular expressions denoting probabilistic languages in which every word is assigned a probability of being generated. We present and prove the completeness of an inference system for reasoning about probabilistic language equivalence of PRE based on Salomaa's axiomatisation of Kleene Algebra.

We introduce Probabilistic Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests (ProbGKAT), an extension of GKAT that allows reasoning about uninterpreted imperative programs with probabilistic branching. We give its operational semantics in terms of special class of probabilistic automata. We give a sound and complete Salomaa-style axiomatisation of bisimilarity of ProbGKAT expressions. Finally, we show that bisimilarity of ProbGKAT expressions can be decided in $O(n^3 \log n)$ time via a generic partition refinement algorithm.

We develop a (co)algebraic framework to study a family of process calculi with monadic branching structures and recursion operators. Our framework features a uniform semantics of process terms and a complete axiomatisation of semantic equivalence. We show that there are uniformly defined fragments of our calculi that capture well-known examples from the literature like regular expressions modulo bisimilarity and guarded Kleene algebra with tests. We also derive new calculi for probabilistic and convex processes with an analogue of Kleene star.