Design of a solver for multi-agent epistemic planning

As the interest in Artificial Intelligence continues to grow it is becoming more and more important to investigate formalization and tools that allow us to exploit logic to reason about the world. In particular, given the increasing number of multi-agents systems that could benefit from techniques of automated reasoning, exploring new ways to define not only the world's status but also the agents' information is constantly growing in importance. This type of reasoning, i.e., about agents' perception of the world and also about agents' knowledge of her and others' knowledge, is referred to as epistemic reasoning. In our work we will try to formalize this concept, expressed through epistemic logic, for dynamic domains. In particular we will attempt to define a new action-based language for multi-agent epistemic planning and to implement an epistemic planner based on it. This solver should provide a tool flexible enough to be able to reason on different domains, e.g., economy, security, justice and politics, where reasoning about others' beliefs could lead to winning strategies or help in changing a group of agents' view of the world.Comment: In Proceedings ICLP 2019, arXiv:1909.07646. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1511.01960 by other author

Planning while Believing to Know

Over the last few years, the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become essential in our daily life and in several working scenarios. Among the various branches of AI, automated planning and the study of multi-agent systems are central research fields. This thesis focuses on a combination of these two areas: that is, a specialized kind of planning known as Multi-agent Epistemic Planning. This field of research is concentrated on all those scenarios where agents, reasoning in the space of knowledge/beliefs, try to find a plan to reach a desirable state from a starting one. This requires agents able to reason about her/his and others’ knowledge/beliefs and, therefore, capable of performing epistemic reasoning. Being aware of the information flows and the others’ states of mind is, in fact, a key aspect in several planning situations. That is why developing autonomous agents, that can reason considering the perspectives of their peers, is paramount to model a variety of real-world domains. The objective of our work is to formalize an environment where a complete characterization of the agents’ knowledge/beliefs interactions and updates are possible. In particular, we achieved such a goal by defining a new action-based language for Multi-agent Epistemic Planning and implementing epistemic planners based on it. These solvers, flexible enough to reason about various domains and different nuances of knowledge/belief update, can provide a solid base for further research on epistemic reasoning or real-base applications. This dissertation also proposes the design of a more general epistemic planning architecture. This architecture, following famous cognitive theories, tries to emulate some characteristics of the human decision-making process. In particular, we envisioned a system composed of several solving processes, each one with its own trade-off between efficiency and correctness, which are arbitrated by a meta-cognitive module

Model checking probabilistic epistemic logic for probabilistic multiagent systems

© 2018 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.All right reserved. In this work we study the model checking problem for probabilistic multiagent systems with respect to the probabilistic epistemic logic PETL, which can specify both temporal and epistemic properties. We show that under the realistic assumption of uniform schedulers, i.e., the choice of every agent depends only on its observation history, PETL model checking is undecidable. By restricting the class of schedulers to be memoryless schedulers, we show that the problem becomes decidable. More importantly, we design a novel algorithm which reduces the model checking problem into a mixed integer non-linear programming problem, which can then be solved by using an SMT solver. The algorithm has been implemented in an existing model checker and experiments are conducted on examples from the IPPC competitions

An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

Learnability with PAC Semantics for Multi-agent Beliefs

The tension between deduction and induction is perhaps the most fundamental issue in areas such as philosophy, cognition and artificial intelligence. In an influential paper, Valiant recognised that the challenge of learning should be integrated with deduction. In particular, he proposed a semantics to capture the quality possessed by the output of Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning algorithms when formulated in a logic. Although weaker than classical entailment, it allows for a powerful model-theoretic framework for answering queries. In this paper, we provide a new technical foundation to demonstrate PAC learning with multi-agent epistemic logics. To circumvent the negative results in the literature on the difficulty of robust learning with the PAC semantics, we consider so-called implicit learning where we are able to incorporate observations to the background theory in service of deciding the entailment of an epistemic query. We prove correctness of the learning procedure and discuss results on the sample complexity, that is how many observations we will need to provably assert that the query is entailed given a user-specified error bound. Finally, we investigate under what circumstances this algorithm can be made efficient. On the last point, given that reasoning in epistemic logics especially in multi-agent epistemic logics is PSPACE-complete, it might seem like there is no hope for this problem. We leverage some recent results on the so-called Representation Theorem explored for single-agent and multi-agent epistemic logics with the only knowing operator to reduce modal reasoning to propositional reasoning