We study the relative expressiveness of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) formulated in the expressive Description Logic extended with closed predicates. In particular, we present a polynomial time translation from OMQs into Datalog with negation under the stable model semantics, the formalism that underlies Answer Set Programming. This is a novel and non-trivial result: the considered OMQs are not only non-monotonic, but also feature a tricky combination of nominals, inverse roles, and counting. We start with atomic queries and then lift our approach to a large class of first-order queries where quantification is “guarded” by closed predicates. Our translation is based on a characterization of the query answering problem via integer programming, and a specially crafted program in Datalog with negation that finds solutions to dynamically generated systems of integer inequalities. As an important by-product of our translation we get that the query answering problem is co-NP-complete in data complexity for the considered class of OMQs. Thus, answering these OMQs in the presence of closed predicates is not harder than answering them in the standard setting. This is not obvious as closed predicates are known to increase data complexity for some existing ontology languages.
Decentralized training is a robust solution for learning over an extensive network of distributed agents. Many existing solutions involve the averaging of locally inferred parameters which constrain the architecture to independent agents with identical learning algorithms. Here, we propose decentralized fused-learner architectures for Bayesian reinforcement learning, named fused Bayesian-learner architectures (FBLAs), that are capable of learning an optimal policy by fusing potentially heterogeneous Bayesian policy gradient learners, i.e., agents that employ different learning architectures to estimate the gradient of a control policy. The novelty of FBLAs relies on fusing the full posterior distributions of the local policy gradients. The inclusion of higher-order information, i.e., probabilistic uncertainty, is employed to robustly fuse the locally-trained parameters. FBLAs find the barycenter of all local posterior densities by minimizing the total Kullback–Leibler divergence from the barycenter distribution to the local posterior densities. The proposed FBLAs are demonstrated on a sensor-selection problem for Bernoulli tracking, where multiple sensors observe a dynamic target and only a subset of sensors is allowed to be active at any time.
Much of the social choice literature examines direct voting systems, in which voters submit their ranked preferences over candidates and a voting rule picks a winner. Real-world elections and decision-making processes are often more complex and involve multiple stages. For instance, one popular voting system filters candidates through primaries: first, voters affiliated with each political party vote over candidates of their own party and the voting rule picks a set of candidates, one from each party, who then compete in a general election.
We present a model to analyze such multi-stage elections, and conduct what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first quantitative comparison of the direct and primary voting systems in terms of the quality of the elected candidate, using the metric of distortion, which attempts to quantify how far from the optimal winner is the actual winner of an election. Our main theoretical result is that voting rules (which are independent of party affiliations, of course) are guaranteed to perform in the primary system within a constant factor of the direct, single stage setting. Surprisingly, the converse does not hold: we show settings in which there exist voting rules that perform significantly better under the primary system than under the direct system. Using simulations, we see that plurality benefits significantly from using a primary system over a direct one, while Condorcet-consistent rules do not.
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of planning paths for agents to reach their targets from their start locations, such that the agents do not collide while executing the plan. In many settings, the plan (or a digest thereof) is conveyed to a supervising entity, e.g., for confirmation before execution, for a report, etc. In such cases, we wish to convey that the plan is collision-free with minimal amount of information. To this end, we propose an explanation scheme for MAPF. The scheme decomposes a plan into segments such that within each segment, the agents' paths are disjoint. We can then convey the plan whilst convincing that it is collision-free, using a small number of frames (dubbed an explanation). We can also measure the simplicity of a plan by the number of segments required for the decomposition. We study the complexity of algorithmic problems that arise by the explanation scheme and the tradeoff between the length (makespan) of a plan and its minimal decomposition. We also introduce two centralized (i.e. runs on a single CPU with full knowledge of the multi-agent system) algorithms for planning with explanations. One is based on a coupled search algorithm similar to A⁎, and the other is a decoupled method based on Conflict-Based Search (CBS). We refer to the latter as Explanation-Guided CBS (XG-CBS), which uses a low-level search for individual agents and maintains a high-level conflict tree to guide the low-level search to avoid collisions as well as increasing the number of segments. We propose four approaches to the low-level search of XG-CBS by modifying A⁎ for explanations and analyze their effects on the completeness of XG-CBS. Finally, we highlight important aspects of the proposed explanation scheme in various MAPF problems and empirically evaluate the performance of the proposed planning algorithms in a series of benchmark problems.