On Action Theories with Iterable First-Order Progression
Abstract
We study the first-order definability of progression for situation calculus action theories with a focus on the iterability of progression. Progression, the task of updating a knowledge base according to actions' effects so that proper information is retained, is notoriously challenging as it in general requires second-order logic. Exceptions where progression is first-order like local-effect actions and normal actions impose certain syntax constraints on action theories to eliminate second-order quantifiers in the progressed knowledge base. Unfortunately, the progressed result might not satisfy the constraints again, making it impossible to apply first-order progression iteratively. In this paper, we first lift the existing result on first-order progression for normal actions by allowing disjunctions in the knowledge base. As a result, we obtain an action theory whose type is called disjunctive normal, which is iteratively first-order progressable. Second, we propose a new class of action theories, called PANACK, that strictly subsumes the disjunctive normal ones, and we show that it remains iteratively first-order progressable as well.
BibTeX
@article{Liu_Claßen_2025, title={On Action Theories with Iterable First-Order Progression}, volume={39}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/33649}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v39i14.33649}, abstractNote={We study the first-order definability of progression for situation calculus action theories with a focus on the iterability of progression. Progression, the task of updating a knowledge base according to actions’ effects so that proper information is retained, is notoriously challenging as it in general requires second-order logic. Exceptions where progression is first-order like local-effect actions and normal actions impose certain syntax constraints on action theories to eliminate second-order quantifiers in the progressed knowledge base. Unfortunately, the progressed result might not satisfy the constraints again, making it impossible to apply first-order progression iteratively. In this paper, we first lift the existing result on first-order progression for normal actions by allowing disjunctions in the knowledge base. As a result, we obtain an action theory whose type is called disjunctive normal, which is iteratively first-order progressable. Second, we propose a new class of action theories, called PANACK, that strictly subsumes the disjunctive normal ones, and we show that it remains iteratively first-order progressable as well.}, number={14}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Liu, Daxin and Claßen, Jens}, year={2025}, month={Apr.}, pages={15041-15048} }