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Answer set solving in practice
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving approach, initially tailored to modeling problems in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). More recently, its attractive combination of a rich yet simple modeling language with high-performance solving capacities has sparked interest in many other areas even beyond KRR. This book presents a practical introduction to ASP, aiming at using ASP languages and systems for solving application problems. Starting from the essential formal foundations, it introduces ASP's solving technology, modeling language and methodology, while illustrating the overall solving process by practical examples.
Book
ASP-Core-2 Input Language Format
Standardization of solver input languages has been a main driver for the growth of several areas within knowledge representation and reasoning, fostering the exploitation in actual applications. In this document, we present the ASP-CORE-2 standard input language for Answer Set Programming, which has been adopted in ASP Competition events since 2013.
Journal Article
Learning programs by learning from failures
We describe an inductive logic programming (ILP) approach called learning from failures. In this approach, an ILP system (the learner) decomposes the learning problem into three separate stages: generate, test, and constrain. In the generate stage, the learner generates a hypothesis (a logic program) that satisfies a set of hypothesis constraints (constraints on the syntactic form of hypotheses). In the test stage, the learner tests the hypothesis against training examples. A hypothesis fails when it does not entail all the positive examples or entails a negative example. If a hypothesis fails, then, in the constrain stage, the learner learns constraints from the failed hypothesis to prune the hypothesis space, i.e. to constrain subsequent hypothesis generation. For instance, if a hypothesis is too general (entails a negative example), the constraints prune generalisations of the hypothesis. If a hypothesis is too specific (does not entail all the positive examples), the constraints prune specialisations of the hypothesis. This loop repeats until either (i) the learner finds a hypothesis that entails all the positive and none of the negative examples, or (ii) there are no more hypotheses to test. We introduce Popper, an ILP system that implements this approach by combining answer set programming and Prolog. Popper supports infinite problem domains, reasoning about lists and numbers, learning textually minimal programs, and learning recursive programs. Our experimental results on three domains (toy game problems, robot strategies, and list transformations) show that (i) constraints drastically improve learning performance, and (ii) Popper can outperform existing ILP systems, both in terms of predictive accuracies and learning times.
Journal Article
Learning Logic Specifications for Policy Guidance in POMDPs: an Inductive Logic Programming Approach
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a powerful framework for planning under uncertainty. They allow to model state uncertainty as a belief probability distribution. Approximate solvers based on Monte Carlo sampling show great success to relax the computational demand and perform online planning. However, scaling to complex realistic domains with many actions and long planning horizons is still a major challenge, and a key point to achieve good performance is guiding the action-selection process with domain-dependent policy heuristics which are tailored for the specific application domain. We propose to learn high-quality heuristics from POMDP traces of executions generated by any solver. We convert the belief-action pairs to a logical semantics, and exploit data- and time-efficient Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to generate interpretable belief-based policy specifications, which are then used as online heuristics. We evaluate thoroughly our methodology on two notoriously challenging POMDP problems, involving large action spaces and long planning horizons, namely, rocksample and pocman. Considering different state-of-the-art online POMDP solvers, including POMCP, DESPOT and AdaOPS, we show that learned heuristics expressed in Answer Set Programming (ASP) yield performance superior to neural networks and similar to optimal handcrafted task-specific heuristics within lower computational time. Moreover, they well generalize to more challenging scenarios not experienced in the training phase (e.g., increasing rocks and grid size in rocksample, incrementing the size of the map and the aggressivity of ghosts in pocman).
Journal Article
The Sixth Answer Set Programming Competition
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known paradigm of declarative programming with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Similar to other closely related problem-solving technologies, such as SAT/SMT, QBF, Planning and Scheduling, advancements in ASP solving are assessed in competition events. In this paper, we report about the design and results of the Sixth ASP Competition, which was jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), Aalto University (Finland), and the University of Genoa (Italy), in affiliation with the 13th International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning. This edition maintained some of the design decisions introduced in 2014, e.g., the conception of sub-tracks, the scoring scheme, and the adherence to a fixed modeling language in order to push the adoption of the ASP-Core-2 standard. On the other hand, it featured also some novelties, like a benchmark selection stage classifying instances according to their empirical hardness, and a \"Marathon\" track where the top-performing systems are given more time for solving hard benchmarks.
Journal Article
Declarative Algorithms and Complexity Results for Assumption-Based Argumentation
The study of computational models for argumentation is a vibrant area of artificial intelligence and, in particular, knowledge representation and reasoning research. Arguments most often have an intrinsic structure made explicit through derivations from more basic structures. Computational models for structured argumentation enable making the internal structure of arguments explicit. Assumption-based argumentation (ABA) is a central structured formalism for argumentation in AI. In this article, we make both algorithmic and complexity-theoretic advances in the study of ABA. In terms of algorithms, we propose a new approach to reasoning in a commonly studied fragment of ABA (namely the logic programming fragment) with and without preferences. While previous approaches to reasoning over ABA frameworks apply either specialized algorithms or translate ABA reasoning to reasoning over abstract argumentation frameworks, we develop a direct declarative approach to ABA reasoning by encoding ABA reasoning tasks in answer set programming. We show via an extensive empirical evaluation that our approach significantly improves on the empirical performance of current ABA reasoning systems. In terms of computational complexity, while the complexity of reasoning over ABA frameworks is well-understood, the complexity of reasoning in the ABA+ formalism integrating preferences into ABA is currently not fully established. Towards bridging this gap, our results suggest that the integration of preferential information into ABA via so-called reverse attacks results in increased problem complexity for several central argumentation semantics.
Journal Article
Domain-Specific Heuristics in Answer Set Programming: A Declarative Non-Monotonic Approach
Domain-specific heuristics are an essential technique for solving combinatorial problems efficiently. Current approaches to integrate domain-specific heuristics with Answer Set Programming (ASP) are unsatisfactory when dealing with heuristics that are specified non-monotonically on the basis of partial assignments. Such heuristics frequently occur in practice, for example, when picking an item that has not yet been placed in bin packing. Therefore, we present novel syntax and semantics for declarative specifications of domain-specific heuristics in ASP. Our approach supports heuristic statements that depend on the partial assignment maintained during solving, which has not been possible before. We provide an implementation in Alpha that makes Alpha the first lazy-grounding ASP system to support declaratively specified domain-specific heuristics. Two practical example domains are used to demonstrate the benefits of our proposal. Additionally, we use our approach to implement informed search with A*, which is tackled within ASP for the first time. A* is applied to two further search problems. The experiments confirm that combining lazy-grounding ASP solving and our novel heuristics can be vital for solving industrial-size problems.
Journal Article
Detect, Understand, Act: A Neuro-symbolic Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework
In this paper we introduce Detect, Understand, Act (DUA), a neuro-symbolic reinforcement learning framework. The Detect component is composed of a traditional computer vision object detector and tracker. The Act component houses a set of options, high-level actions enacted by pre-trained deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies. The Understand component provides a novel answer set programming (ASP) paradigm for symbolically implementing a meta-policy over options and effectively learning it using inductive logic programming (ILP). We evaluate our framework on the Animal-AI (AAI) competition testbed, a set of physical cognitive reasoning problems. Given a set of pre-trained DRL policies, DUA requires only a few examples to learn a meta-policy that allows it to improve the state-of-the-art on multiple of the most challenging categories from the testbed. DUA constitutes the first holistic hybrid integration of computer vision, ILP and DRL applied to an AAI-like environment and sets the foundations for further use of ILP in complex DRL challenges.
Journal Article
Answer Set Planning: A Survey
Answer Set Planning refers to the use of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to compute plans , that is, solutions to planning problems, that transform a given state of the world to another state. The development of efficient and scalable answer set solvers has provided a significant boost to the development of ASP-based planning systems. This paper surveys the progress made during the last two and a half decades in the area of answer set planning, from its foundations to its use in challenging planning domains. The survey explores the advantages and disadvantages of answer set planning. It also discusses typical applications of answer set planning and presents a set of challenges for future research.
Journal Article
The Seventh Answer Set Programming Competition: Design and Results
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a prominent knowledge representation language with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Biennial ASP competitions are organized in order to furnish challenging benchmark collections and assess the advancement of the state of the art in ASP solving. In this paper, we report on the design and results of the Seventh ASP Competition, jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), the University of Genova (Italy), and the University of Potsdam (Germany), in affiliation with the 14th International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2017).
Journal Article