On the Progression of Belief

Abstract

Based on weighted possible-world semantics, Belle and Lakemeyer recently proposed the logic DS, a probabilistic extension of a modal variant of the situation calculus with a model of belief. The logic has many desirable properties like full introspection and it is able to precisely capture the beliefs of a probabilistic knowledge base in terms of the notion of only-believing. While the proposal is intuitively appealing, it is unclear how to do planning with such logic. The reason behind this is that the logic lacks projection reasoning mechanisms. Projection reasoning, in general, is to decide what holds after actions. Two main solutions to projection exist: regression and progression. Roughly, regression reduces a query about the future to a query about the initial state while progression, on the other hand, changes the initial state according to the effects of actions and then checks whether the formula holds in the updated state. In this paper, we study projection by progression in the logic DS. It is known that the progression of a categorical knowledge base wrt a noise-free action corresponds to what is only-known after that action. We show how to progress a type of probabilistic knowledge base wrt noisy actions by the notion of only-believing after actions. Our notion of only-believing is closely related to Lin and Reiter's notion of progression.