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 Logic & Formal Reasoning


Knowing How to Plan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Standard Epistemic Logic (EL) mainly studies reasoning patterns of knowing that ฯ•, despite early contributions by Hintikka on formulating other know-wh expressions such as knowing who and why using first-order and higher-order modal logic. In recent years, there is a resurgence of interest on epistemic logics of know-wh powered by the new techniques for fragments of firstorder modal logic based on the so-called bundle modalities packing a quantifier and a normal epistemic modality together [26, 24, 21]. Within the varieties of logics of know-wh, the logics of know-how received the most attention in AI (cf.


Querying in the Age of Graph Databases and Knowledge Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graphs have become the best way we know of representing knowledge. The computing community has investigated and developed the support for managing graphs by means of digital technology. Graph databases and knowledge graphs surface as the most successful solutions to this program. This tutorial will provide a conceptual map of the data management tasks underlying these developments, paying particular attention to data models and query languages for graphs.


Defeasible Reasoning via Datalog$^\neg$

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hardware architectures can range from the use of GPUs and other hardware accelerators, through multi-core multi-threaded architectures, to shared-nothing cloud computing. Causes for failure to exploit these architectures include lack of expertise in the architectural features, lack of manpower more generally, and difficulty in updating legacy systems. Such problems can be ameliorated by mapping a logic to logic programming as an intermediate language. This is a common strategy in the implementation of defeasible logics. The first implementation of a defeasible logic, d-Prolog, was implemented as a Prolog meta-interpreter (Covington et al. 1997). Courteous Logic Programs (Grosof 1997) and its successors LPDA (Wan et al. 2009), Rulelog (Grosof and Kifer 2013), Flora2 (Kifer et al. 2018), are implemented in XSB (Swift and Warren 2012).


MILP, pseudo-boolean, and OMT solvers for optimal fault-tolerant placements of relay nodes in mission critical wireless networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In critical infrastructures like airports, much care has to be devoted in protecting radio communication networks from external electromagnetic interference. Protection of such mission-critical radio communication networks is usually tackled by exploiting radiogoniometers: at least three suitably deployed radiogoniometers, and a gateway gathering information from them, permit to monitor and localise sources of electromagnetic emissions that are not supposed to be present in the monitored area. Typically, radiogoniometers are connected to the gateway through relay nodes. As a result, some degree of fault-tolerance for the network of relay nodes is essential in order to offer a reliable monitoring. On the other hand, deployment of relay nodes is typically quite expensive. As a result, we have two conflicting requirements: minimise costs while guaranteeing a given fault-tolerance. In this paper, we address the problem of computing a deployment for relay nodes that minimises the relay node network cost while at the same time guaranteeing proper working of the network even when some of the relay nodes (up to a given maximum number) become faulty (fault-tolerance). We show that, by means of a computation-intensive pre-processing on a HPC infrastructure, the above optimisation problem can be encoded as a 0/1 Linear Program, becoming suitable to be approached with standard Artificial Intelligence reasoners like MILP, PB-SAT, and SMT/OMT solvers. Our problem formulation enables us to present experimental results comparing the performance of these three solving technologies on a real case study of a relay node network deployment in areas of the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Italy.


Score-Based Explanations in Data Management and Machine Learning: An Answer-Set Programming Approach to Counterfactual Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We describe some recent approaches to score-based explanations for query answers in databases and outcomes from classification models in machine learning. The focus is on work done by the author and collaborators. Special emphasis is placed on declarative approaches based on answer-set programming to the use of counterfactual reasoning for score specification and computation. Several examples that illustrate the flexibility of these methods are shown.


Leveraging Language to Learn Program Abstractions and Search Heuristics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Inductive program synthesis, or inferring programs from examples of desired behavior, offers a general paradigm for building interpretable, robust, and generalizable machine learning systems. Effective program synthesis depends on two key ingredients: a strong library of functions from which to build programs, and an efficient search strategy for finding programs that solve a given task. We introduce LAPS (Language for Abstraction and Program Search), a technique for using natural language annotations to guide joint learning of libraries and neurally-guided search models for synthesis. When integrated into a state-of-the-art library learning system (DreamCoder), LAPS produces higher-quality libraries and improves search efficiency and generalization on three domains -- string editing, image composition, and abstract reasoning about scenes -- even when no natural language hints are available at test time.


An Empirical Investigation into Deep and Shallow Rule Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Inductive rule learning is arguably among the most traditional paradigms in machine learning. Although we have seen considerable progress over the years in learning rule-based theories, all state-of-the-art learners still learn descriptions that directly relate the input features to the target concept. In the simplest case, concept learning, this is a disjunctive normal form (DNF) description of the positive class. While it is clear that this is sufficient from a logical point of view because every logical expression can be reduced to an equivalent DNF expression, it could nevertheless be the case that more structured representations, which form deep theories by forming intermediate concepts, could be easier to learn, in very much the same way as deep neural networks are able to outperform shallow networks, even though the latter are also universal function approximators. In this paper, we empirically compare deep and shallow rule learning with a uniform general algorithm, which relies on greedy mini-batch based optimization. Our experiments on both artificial and real-world benchmark data indicate that deep rule networks outperform shallow networks.


Equilibrium Design for Concurrent Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In game theory, mechanism design is concerned with the design of incentives so that a desired outcome of the game can be achieved. In this paper, we study the design of incentives so that a desirable equilibrium is obtained, for instance, an equilibrium satisfying a given temporal logic property -- a problem that we call equilibrium design. We base our study on a framework where system specifications are represented as temporal logic formulae, games as quantitative concurrent game structures, and players' goals as mean-payoff objectives. In particular, we consider system specifications given by LTL and GR(1) formulae, and show that implementing a mechanism to ensure that a given temporal logic property is satisfied on some/every Nash equilibrium of the game, whenever such a mechanism exists, can be done in PSPACE for LTL properties and in NP/$\Sigma^{P}_{2}$ for GR(1) specifications. We also study the complexity of various related decision and optimisation problems, such as optimality and uniqueness of solutions, and show that the complexities of all such problems lie within the polynomial hierarchy. As an application, equilibrium design can be used as an alternative solution to the rational synthesis and verification problems for concurrent games with mean-payoff objectives whenever no solution exists, or as a technique to repair, whenever possible, concurrent games with undesirable rational outcomes (Nash equilibria) in an optimal way.


Classical Planning as QBF without Grounding (extended version)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Most classical planners use grounding as a preprocessing step, reducing planning to propositional logic. However, grounding comes with a severe cost in memory, resulting in large encodings for SAT/QBF based planners. Despite the optimisations in SAT/QBF encodings such as action splitting, compact encodings and using parallel plans, the memory usage due to grounding remains a bottleneck when actions have many parameters, such as in the Organic Synthesis problems from the IPC 2018 planning competition (in its original non-split form). In this paper, we provide a compact QBF encoding that is logarithmic in the number of objects and avoids grounding completely by using universal quantification for object combinations. We compare the ungrounded QBF encoding with the simple SAT encoding and also show that we can solve some of the Organic Synthesis problems, which could not be handled before by any SAT/QBF based planners due to grounding.


Generating Contrastive Explanations for Inductive Logic Programming Based on a Near Miss Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent research, human-understandable explanations of machine learning models have received a lot of attention. Often explanations are given in form of model simplifications or visualizations. However, as shown in cognitive science as well as in early AI research, concept understanding can also be improved by the alignment of a given instance for a concept with a similar counterexample. Contrasting a given instance with a structurally similar example which does not belong to the concept highlights what characteristics are necessary for concept membership. Such near misses have been proposed by Winston (1970) as efficient guidance for learning in relational domains. We introduce an explanation generation algorithm for relational concepts learned with Inductive Logic Programming (\textsc{GeNME}). The algorithm identifies near miss examples from a given set of instances and ranks these examples by their degree of closeness to a specific positive instance. A modified rule which covers the near miss but not the original instance is given as an explanation. We illustrate \textsc{GeNME} with the well known family domain consisting of kinship relations, the visual relational Winston arches domain and a real-world domain dealing with file management. We also present a psychological experiment comparing human preferences of rule-based, example-based, and near miss explanations in the family and the arches domains.