The impact of treewidth on ASP grounding and solving of Answer Set Programs

Peer reviewe

Treewidth in Non-Ground Answer Set Solving and Alliance Problems in Graphs

To solve hard problems efficiently via answer set programming (ASP), a promising approach is to take advantage of the fact that real-world instances of many hard problems exhibit small treewidth. Algorithms that exploit this have already been proposed -- however, they suffer from an enormous overhead. In the thesis, we present improvements in the algorithmic methodology for leveraging bounded treewidth that are especially targeted toward problems involving subset minimization. This can be useful for many problems at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy like solving disjunctive ground ASP. Moreover, we define classes of non-ground ASP programs such that grounding such a program together with input facts does not lead to an excessive increase in treewidth of the resulting ground program when compared to the treewidth of the input. This allows ASP users to take advantage of the fact that state-of-the-art ASP solvers perform better on ground programs of small treewidth. Finally, we resolve several open questions on the complexity of alliance problems in graphs. In particular, we settle the long-standing open questions of the complexity of the Secure Set problem and whether the Defensive Alliance problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by treewidth

Treewidth-aware Reductions of Normal ASP to SAT -- Is Normal ASP Harder than SAT after All?

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a paradigm for modeling and solving problems for knowledge representation and reasoning. There are plenty of results dedicated to studying the hardness of (fragments of) ASP. So far, these studies resulted in characterizations in terms of computational complexity as well as in fine-grained insights presented in form of dichotomy-style results, lower bounds when translating to other formalisms like propositional satisfiability (SAT), and even detailed parameterized complexity landscapes. A generic parameter in parameterized complexity originating from graph theory is the so-called treewidth, which in a sense captures structural density of a program. Recently, there was an increase in the number of treewidth-based solvers related to SAT. While there are translations from (normal) ASP to SAT, no reduction that preserves treewidth or at least keeps track of the treewidth increase is known. In this paper we propose a novel reduction from normal ASP to SAT that is aware of the treewidth, and guarantees that a slight increase of treewidth is indeed sufficient. Further, we show a new result establishing that, when considering treewidth, already the fragment of normal ASP is slightly harder than SAT (under reasonable assumptions in computational complexity). This also confirms that our reduction probably cannot be significantly improved and that the slight increase of treewidth is unavoidable. Finally, we present an empirical study of our novel reduction from normal ASP to SAT, where we compare treewidth upper bounds that are obtained via known decomposition heuristics. Overall, our reduction works better with these heuristics than existing translations

DynASP2.5: Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions in Action

Efficient, exact parameterized algorithms are a vibrant theoretical research area. Recent solving competitions, such as the PACE challenge, show that there is also increasing practical interest in the parameterized algorithms community. An important research question is whether such algorithms can be built to efficiently solve specific problems in practice, that is, to be competitive with established solving systems. In this paper, we consider Answer Set Programming (ASP), a logic-based declarative modeling and problem solving framework. State-of-the-art ASP solvers generally rely on SAT-based algorithms. In addition, DynASP2, an ASP solver that is based on a classical dynamic programming on tree decompositions, has recently been introduced. DynASP2 outperforms modern ASP solvers when the goal is to count the number of solutions of programs that have small treewidth. However, for quickly finding one solutions, DynASP2 proved uncompetitive. In this paper, we present a new algorithm and implementation, called DynASP2.5, that shows competitive behavior compared to state-of-the-art ASP solvers on problems like Steiner tree for low-treewidth graphs, even when the task is to find just one solution. Our implementation is based on a novel approach that we call multi-pass dynamic programming

Treewidth-Aware Complexity in ASP: Not all Positive Cycles are Equally Hard

It is well-know that deciding consistency for normal answer set programs (ASP) is NP-complete, thus, as hard as the satisfaction problem for classical propositional logic (SAT). The best algorithms to solve these problems take exponential time in the worst case. The exponential time hypothesis (ETH) implies that this result is tight for SAT, that is, SAT cannot be solved in subexponential time. This immediately establishes that the result is also tight for the consistency problem for ASP. However, accounting for the treewidth of the problem, the consistency problem for ASP is slightly harder than SAT: while SAT can be solved by an algorithm that runs in exponential time in the treewidth k, it was recently shown that ASP requires exponential time in k \cdot log(k). This extra cost is due checking that there are no self-supported true atoms due to positive cycles in the program. In this paper, we refine the above result and show that the consistency problem for ASP can be solved in exponential time in k \cdot log({\lambda}) where {\lambda} is the minimum between the treewidth and the size of the largest strongly-connected component in the positive dependency graph of the program. We provide a dynamic programming algorithm that solves the problem and a treewidth-aware reduction from ASP to SAT that adhere to the above limit

Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade

Description Logic for Scene Understanding at the Example of Urban Road Intersections

Understanding a natural scene on the basis of external sensors is a task yet to be solved by computer algorithms. The present thesis investigates the suitability of a particular family of explicit, formal representation and reasoning formalisms for this task, which are subsumed under the term Description Logic