PolyARBerNN: A Neural Network Guided Solver and Optimizer for Bounded Polynomial Inequalities

Abstract

Constraints solvers play a significant role in the analysis, synthesis, and formal verification of complex embedded and cyber-physical systems. In this paper, we study the problem of designing a scalable constraints solver for an important class of constraints named polynomial constraint inequalities (also known as non-linear real arithmetic theory). In this paper, we introduce a solver named PolyARBerNN that uses convex polynomials as abstractions for highly nonlinear polynomials. Such abstractions were previously shown to be powerful to prune the search space and restrict the usage of sound and complete solvers to small search spaces. Compared with the previous efforts on using convex abstractions, PolyARBerNN provides three main contributions namely (i) a neural network guided abstraction refinement procedure that helps selecting the right abstraction out of a set of pre-defined abstractions, (ii) a Bernstein polynomial-based search space pruning mechanism that can be used to compute tight estimates of the polynomial maximum and minimum values which can be used as an additional abstraction of the polynomials, and (iii) an optimizer that transforms polynomial objective functions into polynomial constraints (on the gradient of the objective function) whose solutions are guaranteed to be close to the global optima. These enhancements together allowed the PolyARBerNN solver to solve complex instances and scales more favorably compared to the state-of-art non-linear real arithmetic solvers while maintaining the soundness and completeness of the resulting solver. In particular, our test benches show that PolyARBerNN achieved 100X speedup compared with Z3 8.9, Yices 2.6, and NASALib (a solver that uses Bernstein expansion to solve multivariate polynomial constraints) on a variety of standard test benches