52 research outputs found
Incremental Cardinality Constraints for MaxSAT
Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is an optimization variant of the Boolean
Satisfiability (SAT) problem. In general, MaxSAT algorithms perform a
succession of SAT solver calls to reach an optimum solution making extensive
use of cardinality constraints. Many of these algorithms are non-incremental in
nature, i.e. at each iteration the formula is rebuilt and no knowledge is
reused from one iteration to another. In this paper, we exploit the knowledge
acquired across iterations using novel schemes to use cardinality constraints
in an incremental fashion. We integrate these schemes with several MaxSAT
algorithms. Our experimental results show a significant performance boost for
these algo- rithms as compared to their non-incremental counterparts. These
results suggest that incremental cardinality constraints could be beneficial
for other constraint solving domains.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Final version published in Principles
and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP) 201
Reduced Cost Fixing for Maximum Satisfiability
Peer reviewe
On Tackling the Limits of Resolution in SAT Solving
The practical success of Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers stems from the
CDCL (Conflict-Driven Clause Learning) approach to SAT solving. However, from a
propositional proof complexity perspective, CDCL is no more powerful than the
resolution proof system, for which many hard examples exist. This paper
proposes a new problem transformation, which enables reducing the decision
problem for formulas in conjunctive normal form (CNF) to the problem of solving
maximum satisfiability over Horn formulas. Given the new transformation, the
paper proves a polynomial bound on the number of MaxSAT resolution steps for
pigeonhole formulas. This result is in clear contrast with earlier results on
the length of proofs of MaxSAT resolution for pigeonhole formulas. The paper
also establishes the same polynomial bound in the case of modern core-guided
MaxSAT solvers. Experimental results, obtained on CNF formulas known to be hard
for CDCL SAT solvers, show that these can be efficiently solved with modern
MaxSAT solvers
UpMax: User Partitioning for MaxSAT
It has been shown that Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) problem instances can be effectively solved by partitioning the set of soft clauses into several disjoint sets. The partitioning methods can be based on clause weights (e.g., stratification) or based on graph representations of the formula. Afterwards, a merge procedure is applied to guarantee that an optimal solution is found.
This paper proposes a new framework called UpMax that decouples the partitioning procedure from the MaxSAT solving algorithms. As a result, new partitioning procedures can be defined independently of the MaxSAT algorithm to be used. Moreover, this decoupling also allows users that build new MaxSAT formulas to propose partition schemes based on knowledge of the problem to be solved. We illustrate this approach using several problems and show that partitioning has a large impact on the performance of unsatisfiability-based MaxSAT algorithms
Abstract Cores in Implicit Hitting Set MaxSat Solving (Extended Abstract)
Publisher Copyright: © 2021 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.Maximum satisfiability (MaxSat) solving is an active area of research motivated by numerous successful applications to solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. One of the most successful approaches for solving MaxSat instances from real world domains are the so called implicit hitting set (IHS) solvers. IHS solvers decouple MaxSat solving into separate core-extraction (i.e. reasoning) and optimization steps which are tackled by a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and an integer linear programming (IP) solver, respectively. While the approach shows state-of-the-art performance on many industrial instances, it is known that there exists instances on which IHS solvers need to extract an exponential number of cores before terminating. Motivated by the simplest of these problematic instances, we propose abstract cores, a compact representation for a potentially exponential number of regular cores. We demonstrate how to incorporate abstract core reasoning into the IHS algorithm and report on an empirical evaluation demonstrating, that including abstract cores into a state-of-the-art IHS solver improves its performance enough to surpass the best performing solvers of the 2019 MaxSat Evaluation.Non peer reviewe
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