English

Where Common Knowledge Cannot Be Formed, Common Belief Can -- Planning with Multi-Agent Belief Using Group Justified Perspectives

Artificial Intelligence 2025-10-20 v2

Abstract

Epistemic planning is the sub-field of AI planning that focuses on changing knowledge and belief. It is important in both multi-agent domains where agents need to have knowledge/belief regarding the environment, but also the beliefs of other agents, including nested beliefs. When modeling knowledge in multi-agent settings, many models face an exponential growth challenge in terms of nested depth. A contemporary method, known as Planning with Perspectives (PWP), addresses these challenges through the use of perspectives and set operations for knowledge. The JP model defines that an agent's belief is justified if and only if the agent has seen evidence that this belief was true in the past and has not seen evidence to suggest that this has changed. The current paper extends the JP model to handle \emph{group belief}, including distributed belief and common belief. We call this the Group Justified Perspective (GJP) model. Using experimental problems crafted by adapting well-known benchmarks to a group setting, we show the efficiency and expressiveness of our GJP model at handling planning problems that cannot be handled by other epistemic planning tools.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.07981,
  title  = {Where Common Knowledge Cannot Be Formed, Common Belief Can -- Planning with Multi-Agent Belief Using Group Justified Perspectives},
  author = {Guang Hu and Tim Miller and Nir Lipovetzky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.07981},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

12 pages, including supplementary and reference

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:30:17.252Z