Fragments of propositional logic, i.e., tailored sub-languages designed for neatly structured data, are relevant in many practical settings. This paper studies belief update in fragments (e.g., Horn, Krom, affine) that obey a desirable semantic closure condition. We assume update is guided by the well-known Katsuno-Mendelzon (KM) postulates, which in full propositional logic characterize update operators as choice functions guided by total or partial preorders over possible worlds. Because many useful fragments cannot express every connective (e.g., they often lack closure under disjunction), the KM axioms must be rephrased and supplemented to keep updates rational in these less expressive environments. Our main result is a set of representation theorems: once the KM postulates are adjusted, they capture exactly the update operators generated by suitably constrained total or partial preorders within the fragment. In addition, we clarify how revision works in fragments when partial preorders are allowed and also present concrete, fragment-friendly update operators.

Given a CNF formula $φ$ with clauses $C_1, \dots, C_m$ over a set of variables $V$, a truth assignment $\mathbf{a} : V \to \{0, 1\}$ generates a binary sequence $σ_φ(\mathbf{a})=(C_1(\mathbf{a}), \ldots, C_m(\mathbf{a}))$, called a signature of $φ$, where $C_i(\mathbf{a})=1$ if clause $C_i$ evaluates to 1 under assignment $\mathbf{a}$, and $C_i(\mathbf{a})=0$ otherwise. Signatures and their associated generation problems have given rise to new yet promising research questions in algorithmic enumeration. In a recent paper, Bérczi et al. interestingly proved that generating signatures of a CNF is tractable despite the fact that verifying a solution is hard. They also showed the hardness of finding maximal signatures of an arbitrary CNF due to the intractability of satisfiability in general. Their contribution leaves open the problem of efficiently generating maximal signatures for tractable classes of CNFs, i.e., those for which satisfiability can be solved in polynomial time. Stepping into that direction, we completely characterize the complexity of generating all, minimal, and maximal signatures for XOR-CNFs.

Belief change is an important topic of knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence. Within the logical framework, the AGM approach has become a standard and various belief change operations have been considered. While revision, contraction and updating have given rise to a great deal of work, erasure has so far attracted less interest. Erasure is to contraction what update is to revision.This article deals with the study of erasure within the framework of propositional logic. It extends Katsuno and Mendelzon’s approach with additional postulates capturing the minimality of change and proposes two representation theorems for erasure operators, one in terms of total preorders on interpretations, the other in terms of partial preorders on interpretations. Finally, it completes the work of Caridroit, Konieczny and Marquis for contraction by proposing a new representation theorem for contraction operators in terms of partial preorders on interpretations.

Many AI-related reasoning problems are based on the problem of satisfiability of propositional formulas with some cardinality-minimality condition. While the complexity of the satisfiability problem (SAT) is well understood when considering systematically all fragments of propositional logic within Schaefer’s framework, this is not the case when such minimality condition is added. We consider the CardMinSat problem, which asks, given a formula φ and an atom x, whether x is true in some cardinality-minimal model of φ. We completely classify the computational complexity of the CardMinSat problem within Schaefer’s framework, thus paving the way for a better understanding of the tractability frontier of many AI-related reasoning problems. To this end we use advanced algebraic tools.

We refine the complexity landscape for enumeration problems by introducing very low classes defined by using Boolean circuits as enumerators. We locate well-known enumeration problems, e.g., from graph theory, Gray code enumeration, and propositional satisfiability in our classes. In this way we obtain a framework to distinguish between the complexity of different problems known to be in $\mathbf{DelayP}$, for which a formal way of comparison was not possible to this day.

Abstract Recently, belief change within the framework of fragments of propositional logic has gained attention. In the context of revision, it has been proposed to refine existing operators so that they operate within propositional fragments and that the result of revision remains in the fragment under consideration. Later, this notion of refinement was generalized to belief change operators. Whereas refinement allowed one to define concrete rational operators adapted to propositional fragments in the context of revision and update, it has to be specified for contraction and erasure. We propose a specific notion of refinement for contraction and erasure operators, called reasonable refinement. This allows us to provide refined contraction and erasure operators that satisfy the basic postulates. We study the logical properties of reasonable refinement of two model-based contraction operators and two model-based erasure operators. Our approach is not limited to the Horn fragment but applicable to many fragments of propositional logic, like Krom and affine fragments.

In line with recent work on belief change in fragments of propositional logic, we study belief update in the Horn fragment. We start from the standard KM postulates used to axiomatize belief update operators; these postulates lend themselves to semantic characterizations in terms of partial (resp. total) preorders on possible worlds. Since the Horn fragment is not closed under disjunction, the standard postulates have to be adapted for the Horn fragment. Moreover, a restriction on the preorders (i.e., Horn compliance) and additional postulates are needed to obtain sensible characterizations for the Horn fragment, and this leads to our main contribution: a representation result which shows that the class of update operators captured by Horn compliant partial (resp. total) preorders over possible worlds is precisely that given by the adapted and augmented Horn update postulates. With these results at hand, we provide concrete Horn update operators and are able to shed light on Horn revision operators based on partial preorders.

Belief change within the framework of fragments of propositional logic is one of the main and recent challenges in the knowledge representation research area. While previous research works focused on belief revision, belief merging, and belief contraction, the problem of belief update within fragments of classical logic has not been addressed so far. In the context of revision, it has been proposed to refine existing operators so that they operate within propositional fragments, and that the result of revision remains in the fragment under consideration. This approach is not restricted to the Horn fragment but also applicable to other propositional fragments like Krom and affine fragments. We generalize this notion of refinement to any belief change operator. We then focus on a specific belief change operation, namely belief update. We investigate the behavior of the refined update operators with respect to satisfaction of the KM postulates and highlight differences between revision and update in this context.

Many reasoning problems are based on the problem of satisfiability (SAT). While SAT itself becomes easy when restricting the structure of the formulas in a certain way, the situation is more opaque for more involved decision problems. We consider here the CardMinSat problem which asks, given a propositional formula $\phi$ and an atom $x$, whether $x$ is true in some cardinality-minimal model of $\phi$. This problem is easy for the Horn fragment, but, as we will show in this paper, remains $\Theta_2$-complete (and thus $\mathrm{NP}$-hard) for the Krom fragment (which is given by formulas in CNF where clauses have at most two literals). We will make use of this fact to study the complexity of reasoning tasks in belief revision and logic-based abduction and show that, while in some cases the restriction to Krom formulas leads to a decrease of complexity, in others it does not. We thus also consider the CardMinSat problem with respect to additional restrictions to Krom formulas towards a better understanding of the tractability frontier of such problems.

Recently, belief change within the framework of fragments of propositional logic has gained attention. In the context of revision it has been proposed to refine existing operators so that they operate within propositional fragments, and that the result of revision remains in the fragment under consideration. In this paper we generalize this notion of refinement to belief change operators. Whereas the notion of refinement allowed one to define concrete rational operators adapted to propositional fragments in the context of revision and update, it has to be specified for contraction. We propose a specific notion of refinement for contraction operators, called reasonable refinement. This allows us to provide refined contraction operators that satisfy the basic postulates for contraction. We study the logical properties of reasonable refinements of two well-known model-based contraction operators. Our approach is not limited to the Horn fragment but applicable to many fragments of propositional logic, like Horn, Krom and affine fragments.

Recently, belief change within the framework of fragments of propositional logic has gained increasing attention. Previous research focused on belief contraction and belief revision on the Horn fragment. However, the problem of belief merging within fragments of propositional logic has been mostly neglected so far. We present a general approach to defining new merging operators derived from existing ones such that the result of merging remains in the fragment under consideration. Our approach is not limited to the case of Horn fragment; it is applicable to any fragment of propositional logic characterized by a closure property on the sets of models of its formulæ. We study the logical properties of the proposed operators regarding satisfaction of merging postulates, considering, in particular, distance-based merging operators for Horn and Krom fragments.

We consider the weighted satisfiability problem for Boolean circuits and propositional formulæ, where the weight of an assignment is the number of variables set to true. We study the parameterized complexity of these problems and initiate a systematic study of the complexity of its fragments. Only the monotone fragment has been considered so far and proven to be of same complexity as the unrestricted problems. Here, we consider all fragments obtained by semantically restricting circuits or formulæ to contain only gates (connectives) from a fixed set B of Boolean functions. We obtain a dichotomy result by showing that for each such B, the weighted satisfiability problems are either W[P]-complete (for circuits) or W[SAT]-complete (for formulæ) or efficiently solvable. We also consider the related enumeration and counting problems.

We consider logic-based argumentation in which an argument is a pair (Φ, α), where the support Φ is a minimal consistent set of formulae taken from a given knowledge base (usually denoted by Δ) that entails the claim α (a formula). We study the complexity of three central problems in argumentation: the existence of a support Φ⊆Δ, the verification of a support, and the relevance problem (given ψ, is there a support Φ such that ψ ∈ Φ?). When arguments are given in the full language of propositional logic, these problems are computationally costly tasks: the verification problem is DP-complete; the others are Σ p 2 -complete. We study these problems in Schaefer's famous framework where the considered propositional formulae are in generalized conjunctive normal form. This means that formulae are conjunctions of constraints built upon a fixed finite set of Boolean relations Γ (the constraint language). We show that according to the properties of this language Γ, deciding whether there exists a support for a claim in a given knowledge base is either polynomial, NP-complete, coNP-complete, or Σ p 2 -complete. We present a dichotomous classification, P or DP-complete, for the verification problem and a trichotomous classification for the relevance problem into either polynomial, NP-complete, or Σ p 2 -complete. These last two classifications are obtained by means of algebraic tools.

We consider logic-based argumentation in which an argument is a pair (Φ, α), where the support Φ is a minimal consistent set of formulæof a given knowledge base that entails the formula α. We study the complexity of two different problems: the existence of a support and the verification of the validity of an argument. When arguments are given in the full language of propositional logic these problems are computationally costly tasks, they are respectively ΣP2- and DP-complete. We study these problems in Schaefer's famous framework. We consider the case where formulæare taken from a class of formulæin generalized conjunctive normal form. This means that the propositional formulæ considered are conjunctions of constraints taken from a fixed finite language Γ. We show that according to the properties of this language Γ, deciding whether there exists a support for a claim in a given knowledge base is either polynomial, NP-complete, coNP-complete or ΣP2

In this article, we investigate the complexity of abduction, a fundamental and important form of non-monotonic reasoning. Given a knowledge base explaining the world's behaviour, it aims at finding an explanation for some observed manifestation. In this article, we consider propositional abduction, where the knowledge base and the manifestation are represented by propositional formulæ. The problem of deciding whether there exists an explanation has been shown to be Σ2p-complete in general. We focus on formulæ in which the allowed connectives are taken from certain sets of Boolean functions. We consider different variants of the abduction problem in restricting both the manifestations and the hypotheses. For all these variants, we obtain a complexity classification for all possible sets of Boolean functions. In this way, we identify easier cases, namely NP-complete, coNP-complete and polynomial cases. Thus, we get a detailed picture of the complexity of the propositional abduction problem, hence highlighting the sources of intractability. Further, we address the problem of counting the full explanations and prove a trichotomous classification theorem.

Autoepistemic logic extends propositional logic by the modal operator L . A formula φ that is preceded by an L is said to be “believed.” The logic was introduced by Moore in 1985 for modeling an ideally rational agent’s behavior and reasoning about his own beliefs. In this article we analyze all Boolean fragments of autoepistemic logic with respect to the computational complexity of the three most common decision problems expansion existence, brave reasoning and cautious reasoning. As a second contribution we classify the computational complexity of checking that a given set of formulae characterizes a stable expansion and that of counting the number of stable expansions of a given knowledge base. We improve the best known Δ 2 p -upper bound on the former problem to completeness for the second level of the Boolean hierarchy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper analyzing counting problem for autoepistemic logic.

We study the computational complexity of Boolean constraint satisfaction problems with cardinality constraint. A Galois connection between clones and coclones has received a lot of attention in the context of complexity considerations for constraint satisfaction problems. This connection does not seem to help when considering constraint satisfaction problems that support in addition a cardinality constraint. We prove that a similar Galois connection, involving a weaker closure operator and partial polymorphisms, can be applied to such problems. Thus, we establish dichotomies for the decision as well as for the counting problems in Schaefer's framework.

The QXORSAT problem is the quantified version of the satisfiability problem XORSAT in which the connective exclusive-or is used instead of the usual or. We study the phase transition associated with random QXORSAT instances. We give a description of this phase transition in the case of one alternation of quantifiers, thus performing an advanced practical and theoretical study on the phase transition of a quantified roblem.

Abduction is the process of explaining a given query with respect to some background knowledge. For instance, p is an explanation for the query q given the knowledge $p\rightarrow q$. This problem is well known to have many applications, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), and has been widely studied from both an AI and a complexity-theoretic point of view. In this paper we completely classify the complexity of propositional abduction in Schaefer's famous framework. We consider the case where knowledge bases are taken from a class of formulas in generalized conjunctive normal form. This means that the propositional formulas considered are conjunctions of constraints taken from a fixed finite language. We show that according to the properties of this language, deciding whether at least one explanation exists is either polynomial, NP-complete, or $\Sigma_2 {\mathrm{P}}$-complete. Our results are stated for a query consisting of a single, positive literal and for assumption-based solutions, i.e., the solutions must be formed upon a distinguished subset of the variables that is part of the input. We show, however, that our results can be interpreted "dually" for negative queries, and thus also for unrestricted (positive or negative) queries.

The problem SAT of CNF-Satisfiability is the prototype of NP-complete problems. In this problem the question is whether there exists a truth assignment such that each clause contains at least one true literal. Conversely, the problem 1-At-Most-SAT, in which the question is whether there exists a truth assignment so that each clause contains at most one true literal, is polynomial-time decidable. We define an infinite class of problems SAT(ℒ1,…,ℒp), parametrized by symmetric polynomial-time decidable languages and generalizing usual satisfiability problems. For instance, the two problems previously considered are, respectively, parametrized by the languages corresponding to the regular expressions 0*1(0 + 1)* and 0* + 0*10*. We prove a dichotomy theorem for these satisfiability problems with symmetric polynomial clauses: SAT(ℒ1,…,ℒp) is either polynomial or NP-complete. We also show a dichotomy result for the corresponding counting problems. #SAT(ℒ1,…,ℒp) is either in FP or #P-complete. Besides, we provide a normal form characterization of the symmetric regular languages ℒ leading to a polynomial-time decidable problem SAT(ℒ). This characterization induces an algorithm to decide whether a given problem SAT(ℒ1,…,ℒp) is polynomial-time decidable, provided that the languages ℒ1,…,ℒp are symmetric and regular.