Epistemic Planning with Attention as a Bounded Resource

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework for multi-agent epistemic planning that models attention as a limited resource, demonstrating decidability in certain learning scenarios within Dynamic Epistemic Logic.

Contribution

It presents a novel fragment of Dynamic Epistemic Logic incorporating attention, and analyzes the decidability of planning problems with attention constraints.

Findings

Decidability when attention is used for learning

Framework as a fragment of standard DEL

Plan existence problem analyzed

Abstract

Where information grows abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource. As a result, agents must plan wisely how to allocate their attention in order to achieve epistemic efficiency. Here, we present a framework for multi-agent epistemic planning with attention, based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, a powerful formalism for epistemic planning). We identify the framework as a fragment of standard DEL, and consider its plan existence problem. While in the general case undecidable, we show that when attention is required for learning, all instances of the problem are decidable.