In this article, we study the complexity of weighted team definability for logics with team semantics. This problem is a natural analog of one of the most studied problems in parameterized complexity, the notion of weighted Fagin-definability, which is formulated in terms of satisfaction of first-order formulas with free relation variables. We focus on the parameterized complexity of weighted team definability for a fixed formula $\varphi$ of central team-based logics. Given a first-order structure $\mathcal{A}$ and the parameter value $k\in \mathbb N$ as input, the question is to determine whether $\mathcal{A},T\models \varphi$ for some team T of size k. We show several results on the complexity of this problem for dependence, independence, and inclusion logic formulas. Moreover, we also relate the complexity of weighted team definability to the complexity classes in the well-known W-hierarchy as well as paraNP.

The concept of a synchronizing word is a very important notion in the theory of finite automata. We consider the associated decision problem to decide if a given DFA possesses a synchronizing word of length at most k, where k is the standard parameter. We show that this problem DFA-SW is equivalent to the problem Monoid Factorization introduced by Cai, Chen, Downey, and Fellows. Apart from the known $\textsf{W}[2]$ -hardness results, we show that these problems belong to $\textsf{A}[2]$ , $\textsf{W}[\textsf{P}],$ and $\textsf{WNL}$ . This indicates that DFA-SW is not complete for any of these classes, and hence, we suggest a new parameterized complexity class $\textsf{W}[\textsf{Sync}]$ as a proper home for these (and more) problems. We present quite a number of problems that belong to $\textsf{W}[\textsf{Sync}]$ or are hard or complete for this new class.

In this paper we study the parameterized complexity of approximating the parameterized counting problems contained in the class $\#W[P]$, the parameterized analogue of $\#P$. We prove a parameterized analogue of a famous theorem of Stockmeyer claiming that approximate counting belongs to the second level of the polynomial hierarchy.