2026
A Graph-Theoretical Perspective on Law Design for Multiagent Systems
AAAI 2026technical
A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents
20 accepted papers
A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents
The paper proposes to treat object awareness as a form of knowledge, breaking the tradition in the existing literature on awareness. It distinguishes the de re and de dicto forms of such knowledge. The work introduces two modalities capturing these forms and formally specifies their meaning using a
In ethics, individual responsibility is often defined through Frankfurt
Traditionally, the goal of mechanism design was to promote socially desirable behaviour of rational agents, to achieve fairness, or to promote efficiency. I would like to suggest a new subfield of mechanism design, Responsible Mechanism Design, focused on achieving individual accountability of agent
The responsibility gap is a set of outcomes of a collective decision-making mechanism in which no single agent is individually responsible. In general, when designing a decision-making process, it is desirable to minimise the gap. The paper studies the class of mechanisms for which the gap is empty
Common knowledge/belief in rationality is the traditional standard assumption in analysing interaction among agents. This paper proposes a graph-based language for capturing significantly more complicated structures of higher-order beliefs that agents might have about the rationality of the other ag…
In many real-world situations, there is often not enough information to know that a certain strategy will succeed in achieving the goal, but there is a good reason to believe that it will. The paper introduces the term "doxastic" for such strategies. The main technical contribution is a sound and c…
The article proposes a new approach to reasoning about knowledge and strategies in multiagent systems. It emphasizes data, not agents, as the source of strategic knowledge. The approach brings together Armstrong's functional dependency expression from database theory, a data-informed knowledge modal…
An operation is called covert if it conceals the identity of the actor; it is called clandestine if the very fact that the operation is conducted is concealed. The paper proposes a formal semantics of clandestine operations and introduces a sound and complete logical system that describes the interp…
The paper proposes a data-centred approach to reasoning about the interplay between trust and beliefs. At its core, is the modality "under the assumption that one dataset is trustworthy, another dataset informs a belief in a statement". The main technical result is a sound and complete logical syste…
If an agent, or a coalition of agents, has a strategy, knows that she has a strategy, and knows what the strategy is, then she has a know-how strategy. Several modal logics of coalition power for know-how strategies have been studied before. The contribution of the article is three-fold. First,…
The paper studies strategic abilities that rise from restrictions on the information sharing in multi-agent systems. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system that describes the interplay between the knowledge and the strategic ability modalities.
The paper studies preferences of agents about other agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures the properties of such preferences, called "likes". The system can express nested constructions "agent likes humbled people", "agent likes those who like humbled people", etc. T…
An agent, or a coalition of agents, is blameable for an outcome if she had a strategy to prevent it. In this paper we introduce a notion of limited blameworthiness, with a constraint on the amount of sacrifice required to prevent the outcome. The main technical contribution is a sound and complete l…
Discounting future costs and rewards is a common practice in accounting, game theory, and machine learning. In spite of this, existing logics for reasoning about strategies with cost and resource constraints do not account for discounting. The paper proposes a sound and complete logical system for r…
The ability of an agent to comprehend a sentence is tightly connected to the agent's prior experiences and background knowledge. The paper suggests to interpret comprehension as a modality and proposes a complete bimodal logical system that describes an interplay between comprehension and knowledge…
The paper suggests a definition of "know who" as a modality using Grove-Halpern semantics of names. It also introduces a logical system that describes the interplay between modalities "knows who", "knows", and "for all agents". The main technical result is a completeness theorem for the proposed sys…
An agent, or a coalition of agents, faces an ethical dilemma between several statements if she is forced to make a conscious choice between which of these statements will be true. This paper proposes to capture ethical dilemmas as a modality in strategic game settings with and without limit on sacri…
The paper studies two forms of responsibility, seeing to it and being blamable, in the setting of strategic games with imperfect information. The paper shows that being blamable is definable through seeing to it, but not the other way around. In addition, it proposes a bimodal logical system that de…
Logical systems containing knowledge and know-how modalities have been investigated in several recent works. Independently, epistemic modal logics in which every knowledge modality is labeled with a degree of uncertainty have been proposed. This article combines these two research lines by introduci…