Like any other logical theory, domain descriptions in reasoning about actions may evolve, and thus need revision methods to adequately accommodate new information about the behavior of actions. The present work is about changing action domain descriptions in propositional dynamic logic. Its contribution is threefold: first we revisit the semantics of action theory contraction that has been done in previous work, giving more robust operators that express minimal change based on a notion of distance between Kripke-models. Second we give algorithms for syntactical action theory contraction and establish their correctness w.r.t. our semantics. Finally we state postulates for action theory contraction and assess the behavior of our operators w.r.t. them. Moreover, we also address the revision counterpart of action theory change, showing that it benefits from our semantics for contraction.
Liberatore @cite_37 proposes a framework for reasoning about actions in which it is possible to express a given semantics of belief update, like Winslett's @cite_42 and Katsuno and Mendelzon's @cite_1 . This means it is the formalism, essentially an action description language, that is used to describe updates (the change of propositions from one state of the world to another) by expressing them as laws in the action theory. The main difference between Liberatore's work and Li and Pereira's is that, despite not being concerned, at least a priori, with changing action laws, Liberatore's framework allows for abductively introducing in the action theory new effect propositions (effect laws, in our terms) that consistently explain the occurrence of an event.
@cite_37 @cite_42 @cite_1
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The Katsuno and Mendelzon theory of belief update has been proposed as a reasonable model for revising beliefs about a changing world. However, the semantics of update relies on information which is not readily available. We describe an alternative semantical view of update in which observations are incorporated into a belief set by: a) explaining the observation in terms of a set of plausible events that might have caused that observation; and b) predicting further consequences of those explanations. We also allow the possibility of conditional explanations. We show that this picture naturally induces an update operator under certain assumptions. However, we argue that these assumptions are not always reasonable, and they restrict our ability to integrate update with other forms of revision when reasoning about action. Abstract Belief revision and belief update are two different forms of belief change, and they serve different purposes. In this paper we focus on belief update, the formalization of change in beliefs due to changes in the world. The complexity of the basic update (introduced by Winslett, 1990) has been determined by Eiter and Gottlob (1992). Since then, many other formalizations have been proposed to overcome the limitations and drawbacks of Winslett's update. In this paper we analyze the complexity of the proposals presented in the literature: the standard semantics by Winslett (1986), the minimal change with exception and the minimal change with maximal disjunctive information by Zhang and Foo (1996), the update with disjunctive function by Herzig (1996), the abduction-based update and the generalized update by Boutilier (1996). We relate some of these approaches to belief update to previous work on closed world reasoning. This paper studies an abduction problem in formal argumentation frameworks. Given an argument, an agent verifies whether the argument is justified or not in its argumentation framework. If the argument is not justified, the agent seeks conditions to explain the argument in its argumentation framework. We formulate such abductive reasoning in argumentation semantics and provide its computation in logic programming. Next we apply abduction in argumentation frameworks to reasoning by players in debate games. In debate games, two players have their own argumentation frameworks and each player builds claims to refute the opponent. A player may provide false or inaccurate arguments as a tactic to win the game. We show that abduction is used not only for seeking counter-claims but also for building dishonest claims in debate games. Knowledge about how the world changes over time is a vital component of commonsense knowledge for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language understanding. Actions and events are fundamental components to any knowledge about changes in the state of the world: the states before and after an event differ in regular and predictable ways. We describe a novel system that tackles the problem of extracting knowledge from text about how actions and events change the world over time. We leverage standard language-processing tools, like semantic role labelers and coreference resolvers, as well as large-corpus statistics like pointwise mutual information, to identify STRIPS representations of actions and events, a type of representation commonly used in AI planning systems. In experiments on Web text, our extractor’s Area under the Curve (AUC) improves by more than 31 over the closest system from the literature for identifying the preconditions and add effects of actions. In addition, we also extract significant aspects of STRIPS representations that are missing from previous work, including delete effects and arguments. Research in discourse analysis, story understanding, and user modeling for expert systems has shown great interest in plan recognition problems. In a plan recognition problem, one is given a fragmented description of actions performed by one or more agents, and expected to infer the overall plan or scenario which explains those actions. This thesis develops the first formal description of the plan recognition process. Beginning with a reified logic of events, the thesis presents a scheme for hierarchically structuring a library of event types. A semantic basis for non-deductive inference, called "minimum covering entailment", justifies the conclusions that one may draw from a set of observed actions. Minimum covering entailment is defined by delineating the class of models in which the library is complete and the set of unrelated observations is minimized. An equivalent proof theory forms a preliminary basis for mechanizing the theory. Equivalence theorems between the proof and model theories are presented. Minimum covering entailment is related to a formalism for non-monotonic inference known as "circumscription". Finally, the thesis describes a number of algorithms which correctly implement the theory, together with a discussion of their complexity. The theory is applied to a number of examples of plan recognition, in domains ranging from an operating system advisor to the theory of speech acts. The thesis shows how problems of medical diagnosis, a similar kind of non-deductive reasoning, can be cast in the framework, and an example previously solved by a medical expert system is worked out in detail. The analyses provides a firm theoretical foundation for much of what is loosely called "frame based inference", and directly accounts for problems of ambiguity, abstraction, and complex temporal interactions, which were ignored by previous work. The framework can be extended to handle difficult phenomena such as errors, and can also be restricted in order to improve its computational properties in specialized domains. In this paper we show how several different semantics for belief update can be expressed in a framework for reasoning about actions. This framework can therefore be considered as a common core of all these update formalisms, thus making it clear what they have in common. This framework also allows expressing scenarios that are problematic for the classical formalization of belief update. Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents’ actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents’ behavior based on the principle of rationality: the expectation that agents will plan approximately rationally to achieve their goals, given their beliefs about the world. The mental states that caused an agent’s behavior are inferred by inverting this model of rational planning using Bayesian inference, integrating the likelihood of the observed actions with the prior over mental states. This approach formalizes in precise probabilistic terms the essence of previous qualitative approaches to action understanding based on an ‘‘intentional stance” [Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] or a ‘‘teleological stance” [Gergely, G., Nadasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Biro, S. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165–193]. In three psychophysical experiments using animated stimuli of agents moving in simple mazes, we assess how well different inverse planning models based on different goal priors can predict human goal inferences. The results provide quantitative evidence for an approximately rational inference mechanism in human goal inference within our simplified stimulus paradigm, and for the flexible nature of goal representations that human observers can adopt. We discuss the implications of our experimental results for human action understanding in real-world contexts, and suggest how our framework might be extended to capture other kinds of mental state inferences, such as inferences about beliefs, or inferring whether an entity is an intentional agent. Abstract In presence of incomplete information about the world we need to distinguish between the state of the world and the state of the agent's knowledge about the world. In such a case the agent may need to have at its disposal sensing actions that change its state of knowledge about the world and may need to construct more general plans consisting of sensing actions and conditional statements to achieve its goal. In this paper we first develop a high-level action description language that allows specification of sensing actions and their effects in its domain description and allows queries with conditional plans. We give provably correct translations of domain description in our language to axioms in first-order logic, and relate our formulation to several earlier formulations in the literature. We then analyze the state space of our formulation and develop several sound approximations that have much smaller state spaces. Finally we define regression of knowledge formulas over conditional plans. We present a computational theory of the paragraph. Within it we formally define coherence, give semantics to the adversative conjunction "but" and to the Gricean maxim of quantity, and present some new methods for anaphora resolution.The theory precisely characterizes the relationship between the content of the paragraph and background knowledge needed for its understanding. This is achieved by introducing a new type of logical theory consisting of an object level, corresponding to the content of the paragraph, a referential level, which is a new logical level encoding background knowledge, and a met alevel containing constraints on models of discourse (e.g. a formal version of Gricean maxims). We propose also specific mechanisms of interaction between these levels, resembling both classical provability and abduction. Paragraphs are then represented by a class of structures called p-models. Starting with Moggi's work on monads as refined to Lawvere theories, we give a general construct that extends denotational semantics for a global computational effect canonically to yield denotational semantics for a corresponding local computational effect. Our leading example yields a construction of the usual denotational semantics for local state from that for global state. Given any Lawvere theory L, possibly countable and possibly enriched, we first give a universal construction that extends L, hence the global operations and equations of a given effect, to incorporate worlds of arbitrary finite size. Then, making delicate use of the final comodel of the ordinary Lawvere theory L, we give a construct that uniformly allows us to model block, the universality of the final comodel yielding a universal property of the construct. We illustrate both the universal extension of L and the canonical construction of block by seeing how they work in the case of state. This paper presents a general, consistency-based framework for expressing belief change. The framework has good formal properties while being well-suited for implementation. For belief revision, informally, in revising a knowledge base K by a sentence α, we begin with α and include as much of K as consistently possible. This is done by expressing K and α in disjoint languages, asserting that the languages agree on the truth values of corresponding atoms wherever consistently possible, and then re-expressing the result in the original language of K. There may be more than one way in which the languages of K and α can be so correlated: in choice revision, one such "extension" represents the revised state; alternately (skeptical) revision consists of the intersection of all such extensions. Contraction is similarly defined although, interestingly, it is not interdefinable with revision.The framework is general and flexible. For example, one could go on and express other belief change operations such as update and erasure, and the merging of knowledge bases. Further, the framework allows the incorporation of static and dynamic integrity constraints. The approach is well-suited for implementation: belief change can be equivalently expressed in terms of a finite knowledge base; and the scope of a belief change operation can be restricted to just those propositions common to the knowledge base and sentence for change. We give a high-level algorithm implementing the procedure, and an expression of the approach in Default Logic. Lastly, we briefly discuss two implementations of the approach. This paper describes a change theory based on abductive reasoning. We take the AGM postulates for revisions, expansions and contractions, and Katsuno and Mendelzon postulates for updates and incorporate abduction into them. A key feature of the theory is that presents a unified view of standard change operators and abductive change operators rather than a new and independent change theory for abductive changes. Abductive operators reduce to standard change operators in the limiting cases. This paper proposes a method of nonmonotonic theory change. We first introduce a new form of abduction that can account for observations in nonmonotonic situation. Then we provide a framework of autoepistemic update, which describes nonmonotonic theory change through the extended abductive framework. The proposed update semantics is fairly general and provides a unified framework for various update semantics such as first-order update, view update of databases, and contradiction removal of nonmonotonic theories. Human agents are extremely flexible in dealing with Natural Language instructions. I argue that most instructions don't exactly mirror the agent's knowledge, but are understood by accommodating them in the context of the general plan the agent is considering; the accommodation process is guided by the goal(s) that the agent is trying to achieve. Therefore a NL system which interprets instructions must be able to recognize and or hypothesize goals; it must make use of a flexible knowledge representation system, able to support the specialized inferences necessary to deal with input action descriptions that do not exactly match the stored knowledge. The data that support my claim are Purpose Clauses (PCs), infinitival constructions as in @math , and Negative Imperatives. I present a pragmatic analysis of both PCs and Negative Imperatives. Furthermore, I analyze the computational consequences of PCs, in terms of the relations between actions PCs express, and of the inferences an agent has to perform to understand PCs. I propose an action representation formalism that provides the required flexibility. It has two components. The Terminological Box (TBox) encodes linguistic knowledge about actions, and is expressed by means of the hybrid system CLASSIC. To guarantee that the primitives of the representation are linguistically motivated, I derive them from Jackendoff's work on Conceptual Structures. The Action Library encodes planning knowledge about actions. The action terms used in the plans are those defined in the TBox. Finally, I present an algorithm that implements inferences necessary to understand @math , and supported by the formalism I propose. In particular, I show how the TBox classifier is used to infer whether @math can be assumed to match one of the substeps in the plan for @math , and how expectations necessary for the match to hold are computed. We propose a model of abduction based on the revision of the epistemic state of an agent. Explanations must be sufficient to induce belief in the sentence to be explained (for instance, some observation), or ensure its consistency with other beliefs, in a manner that adequately accounts for factual and hypothetical sentences. Our model will generate explanations that nonmonotonically predict an observation, thus generalizing most current accounts, which require some deductive relationship between explanation and observation. It also provides a natural preference ordering on explanations, defined in terms of normality or plausibility. To illustrate the generality of our approach, we reconstruct two of the key paradigms for model-based diagnosis, abductive and consistency-based diagnosis, within our framework. This reconstruction provides an alternative semantics for both and extends these systems to accommodate our predictive explanations and semantic preferences on explanations. It also illustrates how more general information can be incorporated in a principled manner. In this paper we present a new approach to plan understanding that explains observed actions in terms of domain knowledge. The process operates over hierarchical methods and utilizes an incremental form of data-driven abductive inference. We report experiments on problems from the Monroe corpus that demonstrate a basic ability to construct plausible explanations, graceful degradation of performance with reduction of the fraction of actions observed, and results with incremental processing that are comparable to batch interpretation. We also discuss research on related tasks such as plan recognition and abductive construction of explanations. In this paper we recast the classical Darondeau---Degano's causal semantics of concurrency in a coalgebraic setting, where we derive a compact model. Our construction is inspired by the one of Montanari and Pistore yielding causal automata, but we show that it is instance of an existing categorical framework for modeling the semantics of nominal calculi, whose relevance is further demonstrated. The key idea is to represent events as names, and the occurrence of a new event as name generation. We model causal semantics as a coalgebra over a presheaf, along the lines of the Fiore---Turi approach to the semantics of nominal calculi. More specifically, we take a suitable category of finite posets, representing causal relations over events, and we equip it with an endofunctor that allocates new events and relates them to their causes. Presheaves over this category express the relationship between processes and causal relations among the processes' events. We use the allocation operator to define a category of well-behaved coalgebras: it models the occurrence of a new event along each transition. Then we turn the causal transition relation into a coalgebra in this category, where labels only exhibit maximal events with respect to the source states' poset, and we show that its bisimilarity is essentially Darondeau---Degano's strong causal bisimilarity. This coalgebra is still infinite-state, but we exploit the equivalence between coalgebras over a class of presheaves and History Dependent automata to derive a compact representation, where states only retain the poset of the most recent events for each atomic subprocess, and are isomorphic up to order-preserving permutations. Remarkably, this reduction of states is automatically performed along the equivalence. This paper outlines a new theory of plan recognition that is significantly more powerful than previous approaches. Concurrent actions, shared steps between actions, and disjunctive information are all handled. The theory allows one to draw conclusions based on the class of possible plans being performed, rather than having to prematurely commit to a single interpretation. The theory employs circumscription to transform a first-order theory of action into an action taxonomy, which can be used to logically deduce the complex action(s) an agent is performing. This paper presents a logical system in which various group-level epistemic actions are incorporated into the object language. That is, we consider the standard modeling of knowledge among a set of agents by multi-modal Kripke structures. One might want to consider actions that take place, such as announcements to groups privately, announcements with suspicious outsiders, etc. In our system, such actions correspond to additional modalities in the object language. That is, we do not add machinery on top of models (as in [1], but we reify aspects of the machinery in the logical language. The first case of the kind of logics we consider appears in Gerbrandy and Groeneveld [3]. They introduced a language in which one can faithfully represent all of the reasoning in examples such as the Muddy Children scenario. In that paper we find operators for updating worlds via announcements to groups of agents who are isolated from all others. We advance this by considering many more actions; and by using a more general semantics. Our logic contains the infinitary operators used in the standard modeling of common knowledge. We present a sound and complete logical system for the logic, and we study its expressive power. Active inference is emerging as a possible unifying theory ofperception and action in cognitive and computational neuro-science. On this theory, perception is a process of inferringthe causes of sensory data by minimising the error betweenactual sensations and those predicted by an innergenerative(probabilistic) model. Action on the other hand is drawn as aprocess that modifies the world such that the consequent sen-sory input meets expectations encoded in the same internalmodel. These two processes, inferring properties of the worldand inferring actions needed to meet expectations, close thesensory motor loop and suggest a deep symmetry betweenaction and perception. In this work we present a simpleagent-based model inspired by this new theory that offers in-sights on some of its central ideas. Previous implementationsof active inference have typically examined a “perception-oriented” view of this theory, assuming that agents are en-dowed with a detailed generative model of their surround-ing environment. In contrast, we present an “action-oriented”solution showing how adaptive behaviour can emerge evenwhen agents operate with a simple model which bears littleresemblance to their environment. We examine how variousparameters of this formulation allow phototaxis and presentan example of a different, “pathological” behaviour.