Multi-Agent Belief Base Revision

We present a generalization of belief base revision to the multi-agent case. In our approach agents have belief bases containing both propositional beliefs and higher-order beliefs about their own beliefs and other agents’ beliefs. Moreover, their belief bases are split in two parts: the mutable part, whose elements may change under belief revision, and the core part, whose elements do not change. We study a belief revision operator inspired by the notion of screened revision. We provide complexity results of model checking for our approach as well as an optimal model checking algorithm. Moreover, we study complexity of epistemic planning formulated in the context of our framework.

System Z for Conditional Belief Bases with Positive and Negative Information

In non-monotonic reasoning, conditional belief bases mostly contain positive information in the form of standard conditionals. However, in practice we are often confronted with negative information, stating that a conditional does \emph{not} hold, i.e. we need a suitable approach for reasoning over belief bases $\Delta$ with positive and negative information. In this paper, we investigate the interaction of positive and negative information in a conditional belief base and establish a property for partitions of $\Delta$ that is equivalent to consistency. Based on this property, we develop a non-trivial extension of system Z for mixed conditional belief bases and provide an algorithm to compute this partition.

Selection Strategies for Inductive Reasoning From Conditional Belief Bases and for Belief Change Respecting the Principle of Conditional Preservation

Given a belief base ∆ consisting of a set of conditionals,there are many different ways an agent may inductivelycomplete the knowledge represented by ∆ to a completeepistemic state; two well-known approaches are given by systemP and system Z, and also each ranking model of ∆ induces afull inference relation. C-representations are special rankingmodels that obey the principle of conditional indifference.Inductive reasoning using c-representations can be done withrespect to all c-representations, with respect to a subclass of,e.g., minimal c-representations, or with respect to singlec-representations. In this paper, we present and investigateselection strategies for determining single c-representations tobe used for inductive reasoning from belief bases. We developaxioms for specifying characteristics of selection strategies.We illustrate which desirable properties, like syntaxsplitting, are ensured by the axioms, and develop constructionsfor obtaining selection strategies satisfying the axioms.Furthermore, we also present and study the extension of selectionstrategies to c-revisions that follow the principle ofconditional preservation and that have been employed successfullyin various belief change settings.

Non-Prioritized Iterated Revision: Improvement via Incremental Belief Merging

In this work we define iterated change operators that do not obey the primacy of update principle. This kind of change is required in applications when the recency of the input formulae is not linked with their reliability/priority/weight. This can be translated by a commutativity postulate that asks the result of a sequence of changes to be the same whatever the order of the formulae of this sequence. Technically then we end up with a sequence of formulae that we have to combine in order to obtain a meaningful belief base. Belief merging operators are then natural candidates for this task. We show that we can define improvement operators using an incremental belief merging approach. We also show that these operators can not be encoded as simple preorders transformations, contrary to most iterated revision and improvement operators.

Rational Inference Relations from Maximal Consistent Subsets Selection

When one wants to draw non-trivial inferences from an inconsistent belief base, a very natural approach is to take advantage of the maximal consistent subsets of the base. But few inference relations from maximal consistent subsets exist. In this paper we point out new such relations based on selection of some of the maximal consistent subsets, leading thus to inference relations with a stronger inferential power. The selection process must obey some principles to ensure that it leads to an inference relation which is rational. We define a general class of monotonic selection relations for comparing maximal consistent sets. And we show that it corresponds to the class of rational inference relations.