6 research outputs found
Applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving
Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for Answer Set Programming (ASP), there are two usual ways to reach this goal: (i) extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or (ii) designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the
“best” available solver on a per-instance basis.
In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to- compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the instances in a training set and the solvers performance on these instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a test set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the “System Track” of the 3rd ASP competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve a significantly higher number of instances compared with any
solver that entered the 3rd ASP competition
A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm
proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has
been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP
systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving
methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: extending
state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or designing a new ASP
solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of
state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing
automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis.
In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of
cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP
programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the
instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these
instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a
{\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering
solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones
submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows
that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to
obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared
with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and
Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure
Introduction to the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming Special Issue
We are proud to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Theory and
Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), dedicated to the full papers accepted for
the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP). The ICLP
meetings started in Marseille in 1982 and since then constitute the main venue
for presenting and discussing work in the area of logic programming
Multi-engine ASP solving with policy adaptation
The recent application of Machine Learning techniques to the Answer Set Programming (ASP) field proved to be effective. In particular, the multi-engine ASP solver ME-ASP is efficient: it is able to solve more instances than any other ASP system that participated to the 3rd ASP Competition on the "System Track" benchmarks. In the ME-ASP approach, classification methods inductively learn off-line algorithm selection policies starting from both a set of features of instances in a training set,
and the solvers performance on such instances.
In this paper we present an improvement to the multi-engine framework of ME-ASP, in which we add the capability of updating the learned policies when the original approach fails to give good predictions. An experimental analysis, conducted on training and test sets of ground instances obtained from the ones submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition, shows that the policy adaptation improves the performance of ME-ASP when applied to test sets containing domains of instances that were not considered for training