One-Visit Caterpillar Tree Automata

We study caterpillar tree automata [3] that are restricted to enter any subtree at most one time (or k times). We show that, somewhat surprisingly, the deterministic one-visit automata can already, for instance, evaluate trees where the nodes represent some non-associative operations. We show that there exist regular tree languages that cannot be accepted by a one-visit automaton, thus proving a weakened form of a conjecture of Brüggemann-Klein and Wood [3]. We establish that the k-visit property is decidable.