We consider a simple language for writing causal action theories, and postulate several properties for the state transition models of these theories. We then consider some possible embeddings of these causal action theories in some other action formalisms, and their implementations in logic programs with answer set semantics. In particular, we propose to consider what we call permissible translations from these causal action theories to logic programs. We identify two sets of properties, and prove that for each set, there is only one permissible translation, under strong equivalence, that can satisfy all properties in the set. As it turns out, for one set, the unique permissible translation is essentially the same as Balduccini and Gelfond's translation from Gelfond and Lifschitz's action language B to logic programs. For the other, it is essentially the same as Lifschitz and Turner's translation from the action language C to logic programs. This work provides a new perspective on understanding, evaluating and comparing action languages by using sets of properties instead of examples. It will be interesting to see if other action languages can be similarly characterized, and whether new action formalisms can be defined using different sets of properties.

The use of expressive logical axioms to specify derived predicates often allows planning domains to be formulated more compactly and naturally. We consider axioms in the form of a logic program with recursively defined predicates and negation-as-failure, as in PDDL 2.2. We show that problem formulations with axioms are not only more elegant, but can also be easier to solve, because specifying indirect action effects via axioms removes unnecessary choices from the search space of the planner. Despite their potential, however, axioms are not widely supported, particularly by cost-optimal planners. We draw on the connection between planning axioms and answer set programming to derive a consistency-based relaxation, from which we obtain axiom-aware versions of several admissible planning heuristics, such as hmax and pattern database heuristics.

Agents can be thought of as following a social behaviour, depending on the context in which they are interacting. We devise a computationally grounded  mechanism to represent and reason about others in social terms, reflecting the local perspective of an agent (first-person view), to support both stereotypical and empathetic reasoning. We use a hierarchy of agent models to discriminate which behaviours of others are plausible, and decide which behaviour for ourselves is socially acceptable, i.e. conforms to the social context. To this aim, we investigate the implications of considering agents capable of various degrees of theory of mind, and discuss a scenario showing how this affects behaviour.

Description Logic (DL) based ontologies and non-monotonic rules provide complementary features whose combination is crucial in many applications. In hybrid knowledge bases (KBs), which combine both formalisms, for large real-world applications, often integrating knowledge originating from different sources, inconsistencies can easily occur. These commonly trivialize standard reasoning and prevent us from drawing any meaningful conclusions. When restoring consistency by changing the KB is not possible, paraconsistent reasoning offers an alternative by allowing us to obtain meaningful conclusions from its consistent part. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently obtaining meaningful conclusions from (possibly inconsistent) hybrid KBs. To this end, we define two paraconsistent semantics for hybrid KBs which, beyond their differentiating properties, are faithful to well-known paraconsistent semantics as well as the non-paraconsistent logic they extend, and tractable if reasoning in the DL component is.

In optimal planning as heuristic search, admissible pruning techniques are paramount. One idea is dominance pruning, identifying states "better than" other states. Prior approaches are limited to simple dominance notions, like "more STRIPS facts true" or "higher resource supply". We apply simulation, well-known in model checking, to compute much more general dominance relations based on comparing transition behavior across states. We do so effectively by expressing state-space simulations through the composition of simulations on orthogonal projections. We show how simulation can be made more powerful by intertwining it with a notion of label dominance. Our experiments show substantial improvements across several IPC benchmark domains.

Preference Inference involves inferring additional user preferences from elicited or observed preferences, based on assumptions regarding the form of the user's preference relation. In this paper we consider a situation in which alternatives have an associated vector of costs, each component corresponding to a different criterion, and are compared using a kind of lexicographic order, similar to the way alternatives are compared in a Hierarchical Constraint Logic Programming model. It is assumed that the user has some (unknown) importance ordering on criteria, and that to compare two alternatives, firstly, the combined cost of each alternative with respect to the most important criteria are compared; only if these combined costs are equal, are the next most important criteria considered. The preference inference problem then consists of determining whether a preference statement can be inferred from a set of input preferences. We show that this problem is co-NP-complete, even if one restricts the cardinality of the equal-importance sets to have at most two elements, and one only considers non-strict preferences. However, it is polynomial if it is assumed that the user's ordering of criteria is a total ordering; it is also polynomial if the sets of equally important criteria are all equivalence classes of a given fixed equivalence relation. We give an efficient polynomial algorithm for these cases, which also throws light on the structure of the inference.

Propositional Typicality Logic (PTL) is a recently proposed logic, obtained by enriching classical propositional logic with a typicality operator. In spite of the non-monotonic features introduced by the semantics adopted for the typicality operator, the obvious Tarskian definition of entailment for PTL remains monotonic and is therefore not appropriate. We investigate different (semantic) versions of entailment for PTL, based on the notion of Rational Closure as defined by Lehmann and Magidor for KLM-style conditionals, and constructed using minimality. Our first important result is an impossibility theorem showing that a set of proposed postulates that at first all seem appropriate for a notion of entailment with regard to typicality cannot be satis- fied simultaneously. Closer inspection reveals that this result is best interpreted as an argument for advocating the development of more than one type of PTL entailment. In the spirit of this interpretation, we define two primary forms of entailment for PTL and discuss their advantages and disadvantages

A knowledge-based program defines the behavior of an agent by combining primitive actions, programming constructs and test conditions that make explicit reference to the agent's knowledge. In this paper we consider a setting where an agent is equipped with a Description Logic (DL) knowledge base providing general domain knowledge and an incomplete description of the initial situation. We introduce a corresponding new DL-based action language that allows for representing both physical and sensing actions, and that we then use to build knowledge-based programs with test conditions expressed in the epistemic DL. After proving undecidability for the general case, we then discuss a restricted fragment where verification becomes decidable. The provided proof is constructive and comes with an upper bound on the procedure's complexity.

The idea of only knowing is a natural and intuitive notion to precisely capture the beliefs of a knowledge base. However, an extension to the many agent case, as would be needed in many applications, has been shown to be far from straightforward. For example, previous Kripke frame-based accounts appeal to proof-theoretic constructions like canonical models, while more recent works in the area abandoned Kripke semantics entirely. We propose a new account based on Moss’ characteristic formulas, formulated for the usual Kripke semantics. This is shown to come with other benefits: the logic admits a group version of only knowing, and an operator for assessing the epistemic entrenchment of what an agent or a group only knows is definable. Finally, the multi-agent only knowing operator is shown to be expressible with the cover modality of classical modal logic, which then allows us to obtain a completeness result for a fragment of the logic.

RB+-ATL is an extension of ATL where it is possible to model consumption and production of several resources by a set of agents. The model-checking problem for RB+-ATL is known to be decidable. However the only available model-checking algorithm for RB+-ATL uses a forward search of the state space, and hence does not have an efficient symbolic implementation. In this paper, we consider a fragment of RB+-ATL, 1RB+-ATL, that allows only one resource type. We give a symbolic model-checking algorithm for this fragment of RB+-ATL, and evaluate the performance of an MCMAS-based implementation of the algorithm on an example problem that can be scaled to large state spaces.