Lattice Annotated Temporal (LAT) Logic for Non-Markovian Reasoning

Abstract

We introduce Lattice Annotated Temporal (LAT) Logic, an extension of Generalized Annotated Logic Programs (GAPs) that incorporates temporal reasoning and supports open-world semantics through the use of a lower lattice structure. This logic combines an efficient deduction process with temporal logic programming to support non-Markovian relationships and open-world reasoning capabilities. The open-world aspect, a by-product of the use of the lower-lattice annotation structure, allows for efficient grounding through a Skolemization process, even in domains with infinite or highly diverse constants. We provide a suite of theoretical results that bound the computational complexity of the grounding process, in addition to showing that many of the results on GAPs (using an upper lattice) still hold with the lower lattice and temporal extensions (though different proof techniques are required). Our open-source implementation, PyReason, features modular design, machine-level optimizations, and direct integration with reinforcement learning environments. Empirical evaluations across multi-agent simulations and knowledge graph tasks demonstrate up to three orders of magnitude speedup and up to five orders of magnitude memory reduction while maintaining or improving task performance. Additionally, we evaluate LAT Logic's value in reinforcement learning environments as a non-Markovian simulator, achieving up to three orders of magnitude faster simulation with improved agent performance, including a 26% increase in win rate due to capturing richer temporal dependencies. These results highlight LAT Logic's potential as a unified, extensible framework for open-world temporal reasoning in dynamic and uncertain environments. Our implementation is available at: pyreason.syracuse.edu.