2,575 research outputs found
Efficient structural symmetry breaking for constraint satisfaction problems
Symmetry breaking for constraint satisfaction
problems (CSPs) has attracted considerable attention
in recent years. Various general schemes have been proposed to eliminate symmetries. In general, these schemes may take exponential space or time to eliminate all the symmetries. We identify several classes of CSPs that encompass many practical problems and for which symmetry breaking for various forms of value and variable interchangeability is tractable using dedicated search procedures or symmetry-breaking constraints that allow nogoods and their symmetrically equivalent solutions to be stored and checked efficiently
A Partial Taxonomy of Substitutability and Interchangeability
Substitutability, interchangeability and related concepts in Constraint
Programming were introduced approximately twenty years ago and have given rise
to considerable subsequent research. We survey this work, classify, and relate
the different concepts, and indicate directions for future work, in particular
with respect to making connections with research into symmetry breaking. This
paper is a condensed version of a larger work in progress.Comment: 18 pages, The 10th International Workshop on Symmetry in Constraint
Satisfaction Problems (SymCon'10
Symmetry Breaking Using Value Precedence
We present a comprehensive study of the use of value precedence constraints
to break value symmetry. We first give a simple encoding of value precedence
into ternary constraints that is both efficient and effective at breaking
symmetry. We then extend value precedence to deal with a number of
generalizations like wreath value and partial interchangeability. We also show
that value precedence is closely related to lexicographical ordering. Finally,
we consider the interaction between value precedence and symmetry breaking
constraints for variable symmetries.Comment: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligenc
Breaking Instance-Independent Symmetries In Exact Graph Coloring
Code optimization and high level synthesis can be posed as constraint
satisfaction and optimization problems, such as graph coloring used in register
allocation. Graph coloring is also used to model more traditional CSPs relevant
to AI, such as planning, time-tabling and scheduling. Provably optimal
solutions may be desirable for commercial and defense applications.
Additionally, for applications such as register allocation and code
optimization, naturally-occurring instances of graph coloring are often small
and can be solved optimally. A recent wave of improvements in algorithms for
Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and 0-1 Integer Linear Programming (ILP) suggests
generic problem-reduction methods, rather than problem-specific heuristics,
because (1) heuristics may be upset by new constraints, (2) heuristics tend to
ignore structure, and (3) many relevant problems are provably inapproximable.
Problem reductions often lead to highly symmetric SAT instances, and
symmetries are known to slow down SAT solvers. In this work, we compare several
avenues for symmetry breaking, in particular when certain kinds of symmetry are
present in all generated instances. Our focus on reducing CSPs to SAT allows us
to leverage recent dramatic improvement in SAT solvers and automatically
benefit from future progress. We can use a variety of black-box SAT solvers
without modifying their source code because our symmetry-breaking techniques
are static, i.e., we detect symmetries and add symmetry breaking predicates
(SBPs) during pre-processing.
An important result of our work is that among the types of
instance-independent SBPs we studied and their combinations, the simplest and
least complete constructions are the most effective. Our experiments also
clearly indicate that instance-independent symmetries should mostly be
processed together with instance-specific symmetries rather than at the
specification level, contrary to what has been suggested in the literature
Abstraction-based action ordering in planning
Many planning problems contain collections of symmetric objects, actions and structures which render them difficult to solve efficiently. It has been shown that the detection and exploitation of symmetric structure in planning problems can dramatically reduce the size of the search space and the time taken to find a solution. We present the idea of using an abstraction of the problem domain to reveal symmetric structure and guide the navigation of the search space. We show that this is effective even in domains in which there is little accessible symmetric structure available for pruning. Proactive exploitation represents a flexible and powerfulalternative to the symmetry-breaking strategies exploited in earlier work in planning and CSPs. The notion of almost symmetry is defined and results are presented showing that proactive exploitation of almost symmetry can improve the performance of a heuristic forward search planner
Random multi-index matching problems
The multi-index matching problem (MIMP) generalizes the well known matching
problem by going from pairs to d-uplets. We use the cavity method from
statistical physics to analyze its properties when the costs of the d-uplets
are random. At low temperatures we find for d>2 a frozen glassy phase with
vanishing entropy. We also investigate some properties of small samples by
enumerating the lowest cost matchings to compare with our theoretical
predictions.Comment: 22 pages, 16 figure
Next nearest neighbour Ising models on random graphs
This paper develops results for the next nearest neighbour Ising model on
random graphs. Besides being an essential ingredient in classic models for
frustrated systems, second neighbour interactions interactions arise naturally
in several applications such as the colour diversity problem and graphical
games. We demonstrate ensembles of random graphs, including regular
connectivity graphs, that have a periodic variation of free energy, with either
the ratio of nearest to next nearest couplings, or the mean number of nearest
neighbours. When the coupling ratio is integer paramagnetic phases can be found
at zero temperature. This is shown to be related to the locked or unlocked
nature of the interactions. For anti-ferromagnetic couplings, spin glass phases
are demonstrated at low temperature. The interaction structure is formulated as
a factor graph, the solution on a tree is developed. The replica symmetric and
energetic one-step replica symmetry breaking solution is developed using the
cavity method. We calculate within these frameworks the phase diagram and
demonstrate the existence of dynamical transitions at zero temperature for
cases of anti-ferromagnetic coupling on regular and inhomogeneous random
graphs.Comment: 55 pages, 15 figures, version 2 with minor revisions, to be published
J. Stat. Mec
An Algorithm for the Exact Treedepth Problem
We present a novel algorithm for the minimum-depth elimination tree problem, which is equivalent to the optimal treedepth decomposition problem. Our algorithm makes use of two cheaply-computed lower bound functions to prune the search tree, along with symmetry-breaking and domination rules. We present an empirical study showing that the algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art solver (which is based on a SAT encoding) by orders of magnitude on a range of graph classes
On the complexity of computing the -restricted edge-connectivity of a graph
The \emph{-restricted edge-connectivity} of a graph , denoted by
, is defined as the minimum size of an edge set whose removal
leaves exactly two connected components each containing at least vertices.
This graph invariant, which can be seen as a generalization of a minimum
edge-cut, has been extensively studied from a combinatorial point of view.
However, very little is known about the complexity of computing .
Very recently, in the parameterized complexity community the notion of
\emph{good edge separation} of a graph has been defined, which happens to be
essentially the same as the -restricted edge-connectivity. Motivated by the
relevance of this invariant from both combinatorial and algorithmic points of
view, in this article we initiate a systematic study of its computational
complexity, with special emphasis on its parameterized complexity for several
choices of the parameters. We provide a number of NP-hardness and W[1]-hardness
results, as well as FPT-algorithms.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure
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