Skip to main content

A Logic for Reasoning About Decision-Theoretic Projections

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9494))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 519 Accesses

Abstract

A decidable logic is presented, in which queries can be posed about (i) the degree of belief in a propositional sentence after an arbitrary finite number of actions and observations and (ii) the utility of a finite sequence of actions after a number of actions and observations. The main contribution of this work is that a POMDP model specification is allowed to be partial or incomplete with no restriction on the lack of information specified for the model. The model may even contain information about non-initial beliefs. Essentially, entailment of arbitrary queries (expressible in the language) can be answered. A sound, complete and terminating decision procedure is provided.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    By “utility”, we mean ‘expected rewards’.

  2. 2.

    [0,1] denotes \(\mathbb {R}\cap [0,1]\).

  3. 3.

    Either the action is executable and there is a probability distribution (the summation is 1) or the action is inexecutable (the summation is 0). Letting the sum equal a number not 1 or 0 would lead to badly defined semantics.

  4. 4.

    Inexecutability axioms are also called condition closure axioms.

  5. 5.

    Probabilities used for specifying the initial belief-state are assumed given by a knowledge engineer or computed in an earlier process.

References

  1. Smallwood, R., Sondik, E.: The optimal control of partially observable Markov processes over a finite horizon. Oper. Res. 21, 1071–1088 (1973)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Monahan, G.: A survey of partially observable Markov decision processes: theory, models, and algorithms. Manage. Sci. 28, 1–16 (1982)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Boutilier, C., Poole, D.: Computing optimal policies for partially observable decision processes using compact representations. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1996), pp. 1168–1175. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Geffner, H., Bonet, B.: High-level planning and control with incomplete information using POMDPs. In: Proceedings of the Fall AAAI Symposium on Cognitive Robotics, pp. 113–120. AAAI Press, Seattle (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Hansen, E., Feng, Z.: Dynamic programming for POMDPs using a factored state representation. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Planning and Scheduling (AIPS 2000), pp. 130–139 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Wang, C., Schmolze, J.: Planning with POMDPs using a compact, logic-based representation. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2005), pp. 523–530. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Sanner, S., Kersting, K.: Symbolic dynamic programming for first-order POMDPs. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2010), pp. 1140–1146. AAAI Press (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lison, P.: Towards relational POMDPs for adaptive dialogue management. In: Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Student Research Workshop, ACLstudent 2010, pp. 7–12. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Wang, C., Khardon, R.: Relational partially observable MDPs. In: Fox, M., Poole, D. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2010). AAAI Press, Atlanta (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  10. De Weerdt, M., De Boer, F., Van der Hoek, W., Meyer, J.J.: Imprecise observations of mobile robots specified by a modal logic. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI 1999), pp. 184–190 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Bacchus, F., Halpern, J., Levesque, H.: Reasoning about noisy sensors and effectors in the situation calculus. Artif. Intell. 111, 171–208 (1999)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. McCarthy, J.: Situations, actions and causal laws. Technical report, Stanford University (1963)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Gabaldon, A., Lakemeyer, G.: \({\cal ESP}\): A logic of only-knowing, noisy sensing and acting. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2007), pp. 974–979. AAAI Press (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Levesque, H., Lakemeyer, G.: Situations, si! Situation terms no! In: Proceedings of the Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2004), pp. 516–526. AAAI Press (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Poole, D.: Decision theory, the situation calculus and conditional plans. Linköping Electron. Art. Comput. Inf. Sci. 8, 34 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Iocchi, L., Lukasiewicz, T., Nardi, D., Rosati, R.: Reasoning about actions with sensing under qualitative and probabilistic uncertainty. ACM Trans. Comput. Logic 10, 5:1–5:41 (2009)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Kwiatkowska, M., Norman, G., Parker, D.: Advances and challenges of probabilistic model checking. In: Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, pp. 1691–1698. IEEE Press (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Hansson, H., Jonsson, B.: A logic for reasoning about time and reliability. Formal Aspects Comput. 6, 512–535 (1994)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Ross, S., Pineau, J., Chaib-draa, B., Kreitmann, P.: A bayesian approach for learning and planning in partially observable markov decision processes. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 1729–1770 (2011)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  20. Shirazi, A., Amir, E.: First-order logical filtering. Artif. Intell. 175, 193–219 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Rens, G., Meyer, T., Lakemeyer, G.: SLAP: Specification logic of actions with probability. J. Appl. Logic 12, 128–150 (2014)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Rens, G., Meyer, T., Lakemeyer, G.: A logic for specifying stochastic actions and observations. In: Beierle, C., Meghini, C. (eds.) FoIKS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8367, pp. 305–323. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Rens, G.: Formalisms for Agents Reasoning with Stochastic Actions and Perceptions. Ph.D. thesis, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  24. McCarthy, J., Hayes, P.: Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Mach. Intell. 4, 463–502 (1969)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  25. Rens, G., Meyer, T., Lakemeyer, G.: On the logical specification of probabilistic transition models. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (COMMONSENSE 2013), University of Technology, Sydney. UTSe Press (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Saad, E.: Probabilistic reasoning by SAT solvers. In: Sossai, C., Chemello, G. (eds.) ECSQARU 2009. LNCS, vol. 5590, pp. 663–675. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Wang, C., Joshi, S., Khardon, R.: First order decision diagrams for relational MDPs. J. Artif. Intell. Res. (JAIR) 31, 431–472 (2008)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  28. Boutilier, C., Reiter, R., Soutchanski, M., Thrun, S.: Decision-theoretic, high-level agent programming in the situation calculus. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2000) and of the Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI 2000), pp. 355–362. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Littman, M., Majercik, S., Pitassi, T.: Stochastic boolean satisfiability. J. Autom. Reasoning 27, 251–296 (2001)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gavin Rens .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Rens, G., Meyer, T., Lakemeyer, G. (2015). A Logic for Reasoning About Decision-Theoretic Projections. In: Duval, B., van den Herik, J., Loiseau, S., Filipe, J. (eds) Agents and Artificial Intelligence. ICAART 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9494. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27947-3_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27947-3_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27946-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27947-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics