From Coalgebraic Determinization to Belief Construction for Partial Observability

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kori, Mayuko, Watanabe, Kazuki
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Kori, Mayuko
Watanabe, Kazuki
author_facet Kori, Mayuko
Watanabe, Kazuki
contents The belief construction is a fundamental technique for transforming partially observable systems to fully observable ones while preserving the relevant semantics. It plays a central role in the analysis of partially observable systems, in particular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), which is a central model in artificial intelligence and formal verification. In this paper, we develop a coalgebraic framework for the belief construction. To handle observations categorically, we lift a monad to slice categories and introduce a belief decomposition that reorganizes states according to their observations. This allows us to introduce a coalgebraic generalization of the belief construction, obtained by combining the belief decomposition with the coalgebraic determinization of Silva, Bonchi, Bonsangue, and Rutten. In this framework, we show that the semantics of a partially observable system coincides with that of the corresponding belief coalgebra. We then study when the latter further agrees with the semantics of its fully observable counterpart, and use this to identify conditions under which the semantics of a partially observable system coincides with that of the corresponding fully observable belief system. As consequences, we recover the standard equivalence between POMDPs and belief MDPs, and obtain a new equivalence result for weighted transition systems with the semimodule monad.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_25355
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Coalgebraic Determinization to Belief Construction for Partial Observability
Kori, Mayuko
Watanabe, Kazuki
Logic in Computer Science
The belief construction is a fundamental technique for transforming partially observable systems to fully observable ones while preserving the relevant semantics. It plays a central role in the analysis of partially observable systems, in particular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), which is a central model in artificial intelligence and formal verification. In this paper, we develop a coalgebraic framework for the belief construction. To handle observations categorically, we lift a monad to slice categories and introduce a belief decomposition that reorganizes states according to their observations. This allows us to introduce a coalgebraic generalization of the belief construction, obtained by combining the belief decomposition with the coalgebraic determinization of Silva, Bonchi, Bonsangue, and Rutten. In this framework, we show that the semantics of a partially observable system coincides with that of the corresponding belief coalgebra. We then study when the latter further agrees with the semantics of its fully observable counterpart, and use this to identify conditions under which the semantics of a partially observable system coincides with that of the corresponding fully observable belief system. As consequences, we recover the standard equivalence between POMDPs and belief MDPs, and obtain a new equivalence result for weighted transition systems with the semimodule monad.
title From Coalgebraic Determinization to Belief Construction for Partial Observability
topic Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25355