Subjective Knowledge and Reasoning about Agents in Multi-Agent Systems
This work addresses a foundational gap in multi-agent systems for scenarios involving dynamic agent participation and misinformation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing epistemic models.
The paper tackles the problem of representing and reasoning about agents' subjective knowledge regarding the presence or absence of other agents in multi-agent systems, where partial or asymmetric knowledge can influence mental states through misinformation, and it extends Kripke structure-based epistemic models to address this issue while discussing associated challenges.
Though a lot of work in multi-agent systems is focused on reasoning about knowledge and beliefs of artificial agents, an explicit representation and reasoning about the presence/absence of agents, especially in the scenarios where agents may be unaware of other agents joining in or going offline in a multi-agent system, leading to partial knowledge/asymmetric knowledge of the agents is mostly overlooked by the MAS community. Such scenarios lay the foundations of cases where an agent can influence other agents' mental states by (mis)informing them about the presence/absence of collaborators or adversaries. In this paper, we investigate how Kripke structure-based epistemic models can be extended to express the above notion based on an agent's subjective knowledge and we discuss the challenges that come along.