An agent will generally have incomplete and possibly inaccurate knowledge about its environment. In addition, such an agent may receive erroneous information, perhaps in being misinformed about the truth of some formula. In this paper we present a general approach to reasoning about action and belief change in such a setting. An agent may carry out actions, but in some cases may inadvertently execute the wrong one (for example, pushing an unintended button). As well, an agent may sense whether a condition holds, and may revise its beliefs after being told that a formula is true. Our approach is based on an epistemic extension to basic action theories expressed in the situation calculus, augmented by a plausibility relation over situations. This plausibility relation can be thought of as characterising the agent's overall belief state; as such it keeps track of not just the formulas that the agent believes to hold, but also the plausibility of formulas that it does not believe to hold. The agent's belief state is updated by suitably modifying the plausibility relation following the execution of an action. We show that our account generalises previous approaches, and fully handles belief revision, sensing, and erroneous actions.

The dynamic nature of ontology development has motivated the formal study of ontology evolution problems. This paper presents a logical framework that enables fine-grained investigation of evolution problems at a deductive level. In our framework, the optimal evolutions of an ontology O are those ontologies O′ that maximally preserve both the structure of O and its entailments in a given preservation language. We show that our framework is compatible with the postulates of Belief Revision, and we investigate the existence of optimal evolutions in various settings. In particular, we present first results on TBox-level revision and contraction in the EL and FL0 families of Description Logics.

Belief revision has been extensively studied in the framework of propositional logic, but just recently revision within fragments of propositional logic has gained attention. Hereby it is not only the belief set and the revision formula which are given within a certain language fragment, but also the result of the revision has to be located in the same fragment. So far, research in this direction has been mainly devoted to the Horn fragment of classical logic. In this work, we present a general approach to define new revision operators derived from known operators (as for instance, Satoh's and Dalal's revision operators), such that the result of the revision remains in the fragment under consideration. Our approach is not limited to the Horn case but applicable to any fragment of propositional logic where the models of the formulas are closed under a Boolean function. Thus we are able to uniformly treat cases as dual-Horn, Krom and affine formulas, as well.

In Belief Revision the new information is generally accepted, following the principle of primacy of update. In some case this behavior can be criticized and one could require that some new pieces of information can be rejected by the agent because, for instance, of insufficient plausibility. This has given rise to several approaches of non-prioritized Belief Revision. In particular (Hansson et al. 2001) defined credibility-limited revision operators, where a revision is accepted only if the new information is a formula that belongs to a set of credible formulas. They provide several representation theorems in the AGM style. In this work we study credibility-limited revision operators when the information is represented in propositional logic, like in the Katsuno and Mendelzon framework. We propose a set of postulates and a representation theorem for credibility-limited revision operators. Then we explore how to generalize these definitions to the Iterated Belief Revision case, using epistemic states in the Darwiche and Pearl style.

Belief change studies how to update knowledge bases used for reasoning. Traditionally belief revision has been based on full propositional logic. However, reasoning with full propositional knowledge bases is computationally hard, whereas reasoning with Horn knowledge bases is fast. In the past several years, there has been considerable work in belief revision theory on developing a theory of belief contraction for knowledge represented in Horn form. Our main focus here is the computational complexity of belief contraction, and, in particular, of various methods and approaches suggested in the literature. This is a natural and important question, especially in connection with one of the primary motivations for considering Horn representation: efficiency. The problems considered lead to questions about Horn envelopes (or Horn LUBs), introduced earlier in the context of knowledge compilation. This work gives a syntactic characterization of the remainders of a Horn belief set with respect to a consequence to be contracted, as the Horn envelopes of the belief set and an elementary conjunction corresponding to a truth assignment satisfying a certain explicitly given formula. This gives an efficient algorithm to generate all remainders, each represented by a truth assignment. On the negative side, examples are given of Horn belief sets and consequences where Horn formulas representing the result of contraction, based either on remainders or on weak remainders, must have exponential size for almost all possible choice functions (i.e., different possible choices of partial meet contraction). Therefore using the Horn framework for belief contraction does not by itself give us computational efficiency. Further work is required to explore the possibilities for efficient belief change methods.

Answering queries in information systems that allow for ex- pressive inferencing is currently a field of intense research. This problem is often referred to as ontology-based data ac- cess (OBDA). We focus on conjunctive query entailment un- der logical rules known as tuple-generating dependencies, existential rules or Datalog+/-. One of the most expressive decidable classes of existential rules known today is that of greedy bounded treewidth sets (gbts). We propose an algo- rithm for this class, which is worst-case optimal for data and combined complexities, with or without bound on the pred- icate arity. A beneficial feature of this algorithm is that it allows for separation between offline and online processing steps: the knowledge base can be compiled independently from queries, which are evaluated against the compiled form. Moreover, very simple adaptations of the algorithm lead to worst-case-optimal complexities for specific subclasses of gbts which have lower complexities, such as guarded rules.

Computing minimal models is an important task in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning that appears in formalisms such as circumscription, diagnosis and answer set programming. Even the most basic question of whether there exists a minimal model containing a given variable is known to be $\Sigma_2^P$-complete. In this work we study the problem of computing minimal models from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity theory. We perform an extensive complexity analysis of this problem with respect to eleven parameters. Tractable fragments based on combinations of these parameters are identified by giving several fixed-parameter algorithms. For the remaining combinations we show parameterized hardness results and thus prove that under usual complexity theoretic assumptions no further fixed-parameter algorithms exist for these parameters.

We analyze, along the lines of the knowledge compilation map, both the tractability and the succinctness of the propositional language URC of unit-refutation complete propositional formulae, as well as its disjunctive closure URC[V, ∃], and a superset of URC where variables can be existentially quantified and unit-refutation completeness concerns only consequences built up from free variables.

Fixpoints play a key role in the mathematical set up of abstract argumentation theory but, we argue, have been relatively underexamined in the literature. The paper studies the logical structure underlying the computation via approximation sequences of the sort of fixpoints relevant in argumentation. Concretely, it presents a number of novel results on the fixed point theory underpinning the main Dung's semantics and, inspired by recent literature on the logical analysis of equilibrium computation in games, it provides a characterization of those semantics in terms of iterated model updates.

Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) provide the basis for various reasoning problems in the areas of Knowledge Representation and Artificial Intelligence. Efficient evaluation of AFs has thus been identified as an important research challenge. So far, implemented systems for evaluating AFs have either followed a straight-forward reduction-based approach or been limited to certain tractable classes of AFs. In this work, we present a generic approach for reasoning over AFs, based on the novel concept of complexity-sensitivity. Establishing the theoretical foundations of this approach, we derive several new complexity results for preferred, semistable and stage semantics which complement the current complexity landscape for abstract argumentation, providing further understanding on the sources of intractability of AF reasoning problems. The introduced generic framework exploits decision procedures for problems of lower complexity whenever possible. This allows, in particular, instantiations of the generic framework via harnessing in an iterative way current sophisticated Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver technology for solving the considered AF reasoning problems. First experimental results show that the SAT-based instantiation of our novel approach outperforms existing systems.