28,817 research outputs found
Modeling Belief in Dynamic Systems, Part II: Revision and Update
The study of belief change has been an active area in philosophy and AI. In
recent years two special cases of belief change, belief revision and belief
update, have been studied in detail. In a companion paper (Friedman & Halpern,
1997), we introduce a new framework to model belief change. This framework
combines temporal and epistemic modalities with a notion of plausibility,
allowing us to examine the change of beliefs over time. In this paper, we show
how belief revision and belief update can be captured in our framework. This
allows us to compare the assumptions made by each method, and to better
understand the principles underlying them. In particular, it shows that Katsuno
and Mendelzon's notion of belief update (Katsuno & Mendelzon, 1991a) depends on
several strong assumptions that may limit its applicability in artificial
intelligence. Finally, our analysis allow us to identify a notion of minimal
change that underlies a broad range of belief change operations including
revision and update.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for other files accompanying this articl
An Architectural Approach to Ensuring Consistency in Hierarchical Execution
Hierarchical task decomposition is a method used in many agent systems to
organize agent knowledge. This work shows how the combination of a hierarchy
and persistent assertions of knowledge can lead to difficulty in maintaining
logical consistency in asserted knowledge. We explore the problematic
consequences of persistent assumptions in the reasoning process and introduce
novel potential solutions. Having implemented one of the possible solutions,
Dynamic Hierarchical Justification, its effectiveness is demonstrated with an
empirical analysis
Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models for Predicting Concurrent Percept-driven Robot Behavior
This article develops Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models (PHAMs), a realistic
causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern percept-driven
robot plans. PHAMs represent aspects of robot behavior that cannot be
represented by most action models used in AI planning: the temporal structure
of continuous control processes, their non-deterministic effects, several modes
of their interferences, and the achievement of triggering conditions in
closed-loop robot plans.
The main contributions of this article are: (1) PHAMs, a model of concurrent
percept-driven behavior, its formalization, and proofs that the model generates
probably, qualitatively accurate predictions; and (2) a resource-efficient
inference method for PHAMs based on sampling projections from probabilistic
action models and state descriptions. We show how PHAMs can be applied to
planning the course of action of an autonomous robot office courier based on
analytical and experimental results
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