10 research outputs found
Magic Sets for Disjunctive Datalog Programs
In this paper, a new technique for the optimization of (partially) bound
queries over disjunctive Datalog programs with stratified negation is
presented. The technique exploits the propagation of query bindings and extends
the Magic Set (MS) optimization technique.
An important feature of disjunctive Datalog is nonmonotonicity, which calls
for nondeterministic implementations, such as backtracking search. A
distinguishing characteristic of the new method is that the optimization can be
exploited also during the nondeterministic phase. In particular, after some
assumptions have been made during the computation, parts of the program may
become irrelevant to a query under these assumptions. This allows for dynamic
pruning of the search space. In contrast, the effect of the previously defined
MS methods for disjunctive Datalog is limited to the deterministic portion of
the process. In this way, the potential performance gain by using the proposed
method can be exponential, as could be observed empirically.
The correctness of MS is established thanks to a strong relationship between
MS and unfounded sets that has not been studied in the literature before. This
knowledge allows for extending the method also to programs with stratified
negation in a natural way.
The proposed method has been implemented in DLV and various experiments have
been conducted. Experimental results on synthetic data confirm the utility of
MS for disjunctive Datalog, and they highlight the computational gain that may
be obtained by the new method w.r.t. the previously proposed MS methods for
disjunctive Datalog programs. Further experiments on real-world data show the
benefits of MS within an application scenario that has received considerable
attention in recent years, the problem of answering user queries over possibly
inconsistent databases originating from integration of autonomous sources of
information.Comment: 67 pages, 19 figures, preprint submitted to Artificial Intelligenc
Dynamic Magic Sets for Disjunctive Datalog Programs
Answer set programming (ASP) is a powerful formalism for knowledge representation and common sense reasoning that allows disjunction in rule heads and nonmonotonic negation in bodies. Magic Sets are a technique for optimizing query answering over logic programs and have been originally defined for standard Datalog, that is, ASP without disjunction and negation. Essentially, the input program is rewritten in order to identify a subset of the program instantiation which is sufficient for answering the query.
Dynamic Magic Sets (DMS) are an extension of this technique to ASP. The optimization provided by DMS can be exploited also during the nondeterministic phase of ASP systems. In particular, after some assumptions have been made during the computation, parts of the program may become irrelevant to a query (because of these assumptions). This allows for dynamic pruning of the search space, which may result in exponential performance gains.
DMS has been implemented in the dlv system and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the technique
Disjunctive ASP with Functions: Decidable Queries and Effective Computation
Querying over disjunctive ASP with functions is a highly undecidable task in
general. In this paper we focus on disjunctive logic programs with stratified
negation and functions under the stable model semantics (ASP^{fs}). We show
that query answering in this setting is decidable, if the query is finitely
recursive (ASP^{fs}_{fr}). Our proof yields also an effective method for query
evaluation. It is done by extending the magic set technique to ASP^{fs}_{fr}.
We show that the magic-set rewritten program is query equivalent to the
original one (under both brave and cautious reasoning). Moreover, we prove that
the rewritten program is also finitely ground, implying that it is decidable.
Importantly, finitely ground programs are evaluable using existing ASP solvers,
making the class of ASP^{fs}_{fr} queries usable in practice.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur
Beyond the grounding bottleneck: Datalog techniques for inference in probabilistic logic programs
State-of-the-art inference approaches in probabilistic logic programming
typically start by computing the relevant ground program with respect to the
queries of interest, and then use this program for probabilistic inference
using knowledge compilation and weighted model counting. We propose an
alternative approach that uses efficient Datalog techniques to integrate
knowledge compilation with forward reasoning with a non-ground program. This
effectively eliminates the grounding bottleneck that so far has prohibited the
application of probabilistic logic programming in query answering scenarios
over knowledge graphs, while also providing fast approximations on classical
benchmarks in the field
Goal-Driven Query Answering for Existential Rules with Equality
Inspired by the magic sets for Datalog, we present a novel goal-driven
approach for answering queries over terminating existential rules with equality
(aka TGDs and EGDs). Our technique improves the performance of query answering
by pruning the consequences that are not relevant for the query. This is
challenging in our setting because equalities can potentially affect all
predicates in a dataset. We address this problem by combining the existing
singularization technique with two new ingredients: an algorithm for
identifying the rules relevant to a query and a new magic sets algorithm. We
show empirically that our technique can significantly improve the performance
of query answering, and that it can mean the difference between answering a
query in a few seconds or not being able to process the query at all
Interpretable task planning and learning for autonomous robotic surgery with logic programming
This thesis addresses the long-term goal of full (supervised) autonomy in surgery, characterized by dynamic environmental (anatomical) conditions, unpredictable workflow of execution and workspace constraints. The scope is to reach autonomy at the level of sub-tasks of a surgical procedure, i.e. repetitive, yet tedious operations (e.g., dexterous manipulation of small objects in a constrained environment, as needle and wire for suturing). This will help reducing time of execution, hospital costs and fatigue of surgeons during the whole procedure, while further improving the recovery time for the patients. A novel framework for autonomous surgical task execution is presented in the first part of this thesis, based on answer set programming (ASP), a logic programming paradigm, for task planning (i.e., coordination of elementary actions and motions). Logic programming allows to directly encode surgical task knowledge, representing emph{plan reasoning methodology} rather than a set of pre-defined plans. This solution introduces several key advantages, as reliable human-like interpretable plan generation, real-time monitoring of the environment and the workflow for ready adaptation and failure recovery. Moreover, an extended review of logic programming for robotics is presented, motivating the choice of ASP for surgery and providing an useful guide for robotic designers. In the second part of the thesis, a novel framework based on inductive logic programming (ILP) is presented for surgical task knowledge learning and refinement. ILP guarantees fast learning from very few examples, a common drawback of surgery. Also, a novel action identification algorithm is proposed based on automatic environmental feature extraction from videos, dealing for the first time with small and noisy datasets collecting different workflows of executions under environmental variations. This allows to define a systematic methodology for unsupervised ILP. All the results in this thesis are validated on a non-standard version of the benchmark training ring transfer task for surgeons, which mimics some of the challenges of real surgery, e.g. constrained bimanual motion in small space