1,419 research outputs found
Stable Model Counting and Its Application in Probabilistic Logic Programming
Model counting is the problem of computing the number of models that satisfy
a given propositional theory. It has recently been applied to solving inference
tasks in probabilistic logic programming, where the goal is to compute the
probability of given queries being true provided a set of mutually independent
random variables, a model (a logic program) and some evidence. The core of
solving this inference task involves translating the logic program to a
propositional theory and using a model counter. In this paper, we show that for
some problems that involve inductive definitions like reachability in a graph,
the translation of logic programs to SAT can be expensive for the purpose of
solving inference tasks. For such problems, direct implementation of stable
model semantics allows for more efficient solving. We present two
implementation techniques, based on unfounded set detection, that extend a
propositional model counter to a stable model counter. Our experiments show
that for particular problems, our approach can outperform a state-of-the-art
probabilistic logic programming solver by several orders of magnitude in terms
of running time and space requirements, and can solve instances of
significantly larger sizes on which the current solver runs out of time or
memory.Comment: Accepted in AAAI, 201
On SAT representations of XOR constraints
We study the representation of systems S of linear equations over the
two-element field (aka xor- or parity-constraints) via conjunctive normal forms
F (boolean clause-sets). First we consider the problem of finding an
"arc-consistent" representation ("AC"), meaning that unit-clause propagation
will fix all forced assignments for all possible instantiations of the
xor-variables. Our main negative result is that there is no polysize
AC-representation in general. On the positive side we show that finding such an
AC-representation is fixed-parameter tractable (fpt) in the number of
equations. Then we turn to a stronger criterion of representation, namely
propagation completeness ("PC") --- while AC only covers the variables of S,
now all the variables in F (the variables in S plus auxiliary variables) are
considered for PC. We show that the standard translation actually yields a PC
representation for one equation, but fails so for two equations (in fact
arbitrarily badly). We show that with a more intelligent translation we can
also easily compute a translation to PC for two equations. We conjecture that
computing a representation in PC is fpt in the number of equations.Comment: 39 pages; 2nd v. improved handling of acyclic systems, free-standing
proof of the transformation from AC-representations to monotone circuits,
improved wording and literature review; 3rd v. updated literature,
strengthened treatment of monotonisation, improved discussions; 4th v. update
of literature, discussions and formulations, more details and examples;
conference v. to appear LATA 201
New results on rewrite-based satisfiability procedures
Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on
theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability
of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference
system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability
problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan
is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based
first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets
modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficient conditions
for termination on a combinations of theories, given termination on each. The
above theories, as well as others, satisfy these conditions. We introduce
several sets of benchmarks on these theories and their combinations, including
both parametric synthetic benchmarks to test scalability, and real-world
problems to test performances on huge sets of literals. We compare the
rewrite-based theorem prover E with the validity checkers CVC and CVC Lite.
Contrary to the folklore that a general-purpose prover cannot compete with
reasoners with built-in theories, the experiments are overall favorable to the
theorem prover, showing that not only the rewriting approach is elegant and
conceptually simple, but has important practical implications.Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 49 page
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