Epistemic logic programs (ELPs) are a popular generalization of standard Answer Set Programming (ASP) providing means for reasoning over answer sets within the language. This richer formalism comes at the price of higher computational complexity reaching up to the fourth level of the polynomial hierarchy. However, in contrast to standard ASP, dedicated investigations towards tractability have not been undertaken yet. In this paper, we give first results in this direction and show that central ELP problems can be solved in linear time for ELPs exhibiting structural properties in terms of bounded treewidth. We also provide a full dynamic programming algorithm that adheres to these bounds. Finally, we show that applying treewidth to a novel dependency structure---given in terms of epistemic literals---allows to bound the number of ASP solver calls in typical ELP solving procedures.
IRIT University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学IRIT研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Universität Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
In a recent line of research, two familiar concepts from logic programming semantics (unfounded sets and splitting) were extrapolated to the case of epistemic logic programs. The property of epistemic splitting provides a natural and modular way to understand programs without epistemic cycles but, surprisingly, was only fulfilled by Gelfond's original semantics (G91), among the many proposals in the literature. On the other hand, G91 may suffer from a kind of self-supported, unfounded derivations when epistemic cycles come into play. Recently, the absence of these derivations was also formalis…
In this paper we consider Epistemic Logic Programs, which extend Answer Set Programming (ASP) with "epistemic operators" and "epistemic negation", and a recent approach to the semantics of such programs in terms of World Views. We propose some observations on the existence and number of world views. We show how to exploit an extended ASP semantics in order to: (i) provide a characterization of world views, different from existing ones; (ii) query world views and query the whole set of world views.
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic（大西洋太空与海战系统中心）；College of Charleston（查尔斯顿学院）
Recent research in extensions of Answer Set Programming has included a renewed interest in the language of Epistemic Specifications, which adds modal operators K ("known") and M ("may be true") to provide for more powerful introspective reasoning and enhanced capability, particularly when reasoning with incomplete information. An epistemic logic program is a set of rules in this language. Infused with the research has been the desire for an efficient solver to enable the practical use of such programs for problem solving. In this paper, we report on the current state of development of epistemi…
University of Corunna（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is a family of multimodal logics that has proved to be very successful for epistemic reasoning in planning tasks. In this logic, the agent's knowledge is captured by modal epistemic operators whereas the system evolution is described in terms of (some subset of) dynamic logic modalities in which actions are usually represented as semantic objects called event models. In this paper, we study a variant of DEL, that wecall DEL[ASP], where actions are syntactically described by using an Answer Set Programming (ASP) representation instead of event models. This represen…
Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, Federal University of Bahia - UFBA（巴伊亚联邦大学数学与统计学院）
AGM's belief revision is one of the main paradigms in the study of belief change operations. In this context, belief bases (prioritised bases) have been primarily used to specify the agent's belief state. While the connection of iterated AGM-like operations and their encoding in dynamic epistemic logics have been studied before, few works considered how well-known postulates from iterated belief revision theory can be characterised by means of belief bases and their counterpart in dynamic epistemic logic. Particularly, it has been shown that some postulates can be characterised through transfo…
Over the past decade a considerable amount of research has been done to expand logic programming languages to handle incomplete information. One such language is the language of epistemic specifications. As is usual with logic programming languages, the problem of answering queries is intractable in the general case. For extended disjunctive logic programs, an idea that has proven useful in simplifying the investigation of answer sets is the use of splitting sets. In this paper we will present an extended definition of splitting sets that will be applicable to epistemic specifications. Further…
Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs) are an extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) with epistemic operators that allow for a form of meta-reasoning, that is, reasoning over multiple possible worlds. Existing ELP solving approaches generally rely on making multiple calls to an ASP solver in order to evaluate the ELP. However, in this paper, we show that there also exists a direct translation from ELPs into non-ground ASP with bounded arity. The resulting ASP program can thus be solved in a single shot. We then implement this encoding method, using recently proposed techniques to handle large, non…
University of Corunna（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；Universität Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；IRIT（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Epistemic logic programs constitute an extension of the stable models semantics to deal with new constructs called subjective literals. Informally speaking, a subjective literal allows checking whether some regular literal is true in all stable models or in some stable model. As it can be imagined, the associated semantics has proved to be non-trivial, as the truth of the subjective literal may interfere with the set of stable models it is supposed to query. As a consequence, no clear agreement has been reached and different semantic proposals have been made in the literature. Unfortunately, c…
University of Corunna（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
We describe eclingo, a solver for epistemic logic programs under Gelfond 1991 semantics built upon the Answer Set Programming system clingo. The input language of eclingo uses the syntax extension capabilities of clingo to define subjective literals that, as usual in epistemic logic programs, allow for checking the truth of a regular literal in all or in some of the answer sets of a program. The eclingo solving process follows a guess and check strategy. It first generates potential truth values for subjective literals and, in a second step, it checks the obtained result with respect to the ca…
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic（大西洋空间与海战系统中心）；College of Charleston（查尔斯顿学院）；New Mexico State University（新墨西哥州立大学）
As the practical use of answer set programming (ASP) has grown with the development of efficient solvers, we expect a growing interest in extensions of ASP as their semantics stabilize and solvers supporting them mature. Epistemic Specifications, which adds modal operators K and M to the language of ASP, is one such extension. We call a program in this language an epistemic logic program (ELP). Solvers have thus far been practical for only the simplest ELPs due to exponential growth of the search space. We describe a solver that is able to solve harder problems better (e.g., without exponentia…
University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学）
In the context of planning and reasoning about actions and change, we call an action reversible when its effects can be reverted by applying other actions, returning to the original state. Renewed interest in this area has led to several results in the context of the PDDL language, widely used for describing planning tasks. In this paper, we propose several solutions to the computational problem of deciding the reversibility of an action. In particular, we leverage an existing translation from PDDL to Answer Set Programming (ASP), and then use several different encodings to tackle the problem …
AGM's belief revision is one of the main paradigms in the study of belief change operations. In this context, belief bases (prioritised bases) have been largely used to specify the agent's belief state - whether representing the agent's `explicit beliefs' or as a computational model for her belief state. While the connection of iterated AGM-like operations and their encoding in dynamic epistemic logics have been studied before, few works considered how well-known postulates from iterated belief revision theory can be characterised by means of belief bases and their counterpart in a dynamic epi…
Extending the popular Answer Set Programming (ASP) paradigm by introspective reasoning capacities has received increasing interest within the last years. Particular attention is given to the formalism of epistemic logic programs (ELPs) where standard rules are equipped with modal operators which allow to express conditions on literals for being known or possible, i.e., contained in all or some answer sets, respectively. ELPs thus deliver multiple collections of answer sets, known as world views. Employing ELPs for reasoning problems so far has mainly been restricted to standard decision proble…
Epistemic Logic Programs: Non-Ground and Counting Complexity
Institute of Logic and Computation, TU Wien（维也纳技术大学逻辑与计算研究所）；Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA), Linköping University（林雪平大学计算机与信息科学系）；Univ. Artois, CNRS, CRIL（阿图瓦大学、法国国家科学研究中心、CRIL研究所）
Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs) extend Answer Set Programming (ASP) with epistemic negation and have received renewed interest in recent years. This led to the development of new research and efficient solving systems for ELPs. In practice, ELPs are often written in a modular way, where each module interacts with other modules by accepting sets of facts as input, and passing on sets of facts as output. An interesting question then presents itself: under which conditions can such a module be replaced by another one without changing the outcome, for any set of input facts? This problem is known …
A General Framework of Epistemic Forgetting and its Instantiation by Ranking Functions
Faculty of Mathematics（数学系）；Computer Science, University of Hagen, 58084 Hagen, Germany（计算机科学，海因斯大学，德国）；Department of Computer Science, Technology Dortmund University, 44221 Dortmund, Germany（计算机科学系，多特蒙德技术大学，德国）
A neurosymbolic Approach with Epistemic Deep Learning for Hierarchical Image Classification
Institute for AI, Data Analysis and Systems (AIDAS) School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics, Oxford Brookes University, UK（人工智能、数据分析和系统研究所（AIDAS）工程、计算与数学学院，英国奥克斯福德布鲁克斯大学）
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien)（维也纳工业大学）
Recently, the notions of subjective constraint monotonicity, epistemic splitting, and foundedness have been introduced for epistemic logic programs, with the aim to use them as main criteria respectively intuitions to compare different answer set semantics proposed in the literature on how they comply with these intuitions. In this note, we consider these three notions and demonstrate on some examples that they may be too strong in general and may exclude some desired answer sets respectively world views. In conclusion, these properties should not be regarded as mandatory properties that every…
Universidad Simón Bolívar（西蒙玻利瓦尔大学）；Universidad de Los Andes（德洛斯安第斯大学）
In most classical models of belief change, epistemic states are represented by theories (AGM) or formulas (Katsuno-Mendelzon) and the new pieces of information by formulas. The Representation Theorem for revision operators says that operators are represented by total preorders. This important representation is exploited by Darwiche and Pearl to shift the notion of epistemic state to a more abstract one, where the paradigm of epistemic state is indeed that of a total preorder over interpretations. In this work, we introduce a 3-valued logic where the formulas can be identified with a generalisa…
University of Nebraska Omaha（内布拉斯加大学奥马哈分校）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt（阿尔卑斯-亚德里亚大学克拉根福分校）；Texas Tech University（得克萨斯理工大学）
The language of epistemic specifications and epistemic logic programs extends disjunctive logic programs under the stable model semantics with modal constructs called subjective literals. Using subjective literals, it is possible to check whether a regular literal is true in every or some stable models of the program, those models, in this context also called \emph{belief sets}, being collected in a set called world view. This allows for representing, within the language, whether some proposition should be understood accordingly to the open or the closed world assumption. Several attempts for …
In recent years, multi-agent epistemic planning has received attention from both dynamic logic and planning communities. Existing implementations of multi-agent epistemic planning are based on compilation into classical planning and suffer from various limitations, such as generating only linear plans, restriction to public actions, and incapability to handle disjunctive beliefs. In this paper, we propose a general representation language for multi-agent epistemic planning where the initial KB and the goal, the preconditions and effects of actions can be arbitrary multi-agent epistemic formula…
Answer set programming (ASP) is an efficient problem-solving approach, which has been strongly supported both scientifically and technologically by several solvers, ongoing active research, and implementations in many different fields. However, although researchers acknowledged long ago the necessity of epistemic operators in the language of ASP for better introspective reasoning, this research venue did not attract much attention until recently. Moreover, the existing epistemic extensions of ASP in the literature are not widely approved either, due to the fact that some propose unintended res…
Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs), an extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) with epistemic operators, have received renewed attention from the research community in recent years. Classically, evaluating an ELP yields a set of world views, with each being a set of answer sets. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition of world views that represents them as three-valued assignments, where each atom can be either always true, always false, or neither. Based on several examples, we show that this definition is natural and intuitive. We also investigate relevant computational properties…
Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs), that is, Answer Set Programming (ASP) extended with epistemic operators, have received renewed interest in recent years, which led to a flurry of new research, as well as efficient solvers. An important question is under which conditions a sub-program can be replaced by another one without changing the meaning, in any context. This problem is known as strong equivalence, and is well-studied for ASP. For ELPs, this question has been approached by embedding them into epistemic extensions of equilibrium logics. In this paper, we consider a simpler, more direct cha…
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学逻辑、语言与计算研究所）
Dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) is a logical framework for representing and reasoning about knowledge change for multiple agents. An important computational task in this framework is the model checking problem, which has been shown to be PSPACE-hard even for S5 models and two agents---in the presence of other features, such as multi-pointed models. We answer open questions in the literature about the complexity of this problem in more restricted settings. We provide a detailed complexity analysis of the model checking problem for DEL, where we consider various combinations of restrictions, such …
