Heuristic-Based Backtracking Relaxation for Propositional Satisfiability

In recent years backtrack search algorithms for propositional satisfiability (SAT) have been the subject of dramatic improvements. These improvements allowed SAT solvers to successfully solve instances with thousands or tens of thousands of variables. However, many new challenging problem instances are still too hard for current SAT solvers. As a result, further improvements to SAT technology are expected to have key consequences in solving hard real-world instances. This paper introduces a new idea: choosing the backtrack variable using a heuristic approach with the goal of diversifying the regions of the space that are explored during the search. The proposed heuristics are inspired by the heuristics proposed in recent years for the decision branching step of SAT solvers, namely, VSIDS and its improvements. Completeness conditions are established, which guarantee completeness for the new algorithm, as well as for any other incomplete backtracking algorithm. Experimental results on hundreds of instances derived from real-world problems show that the new technique is able to speed SAT solvers, while aborting fewer instances. These results clearly motivate the integration of heuristic backtracking in SAT solvers.     

Resolution cannot polynomially simulate compressed-BFS

Many algorithms for Boolean satisfiability (SAT) work within the framework of resolution as a proof system, and thus on unsatisfiable instances they can be viewed as attempting to find proofs by resolution. However it has been known since the 1980s that every resolution proof of the pigeonhole principle (PHP_n^m), suitably encoded as a CNF instance, includes exponentially many steps [18]. Therefore SAT solvers based upon the DLL procedure [12] or the DP procedure [13] must take exponential time. Polynomial-sized proofs of the pigeonhole principle exist for different proof systems, but general-purpose SAT solvers often remain confined to resolution. This result is in correlation with empirical evidence. Previously, we introduced the Compressed-BFS algorithm to solve the SAT decision problem. In an earlier work [27], an implementation of a Compressed-BFS algorithm empirically solved instances in (n⁴) time. Here, we add to this claim, and show analytically that these instances are solvable in polynomial time by Compressed-BFS. Thus the class of tautologies efficiently provable by Compressed-BFS is different than that of any resolution-based procedure. We hope that the details of our complexity analysis shed some light on the proof system implied by Compressed-BFS. Our proof focuses on structural invariants within the compressed data structure that stores collections of sets of open clauses during the Compressed-BFS algorithm. We bound the size of this data structure, as well as the overall memory, by a polynomial. We then use this to show that the overall runtime is bounded by a polynomial.     

由一阶逻辑公式得到命题逻辑可满足性问题实例

命题逻辑可满足性(SAT)问题是计算机科学中的一个重要问题.近年来许多学者在这方面进行了大量的研究,提出了不少有效的算法.但是,很多实际问题如果用一组一阶逻辑公式来描述,往往更为自然.当解释的论域是一个固定大小的有限集合时,一阶逻辑公式的可满足性问题可以等价地归约为SAT问题.为了利用现有的高效SAT工具,提出了一种从一阶逻辑公式生成SAT问题实例的算法,并描述了一个自动的转换工具,给出了相应的实验结果.还讨论了通过增加公式来消除同构从而减小搜索空间的一些方法.实验表明,这一算法是有效的,可以用来解决数学研究和实际应用中的许多问题.     

Beyond the structure of SAT formulas

Nowadays, many real-world problems are encoded into SAT instances and efficiently solved by modern SAT solvers. These solvers, usually known as Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) SAT solvers, include a variety of sophisticated techniques, such as clause learning, lazy data structures, conflict-based adaptive branching heuristics, or random restarts, among others. However, the reasons of their efficiency in solving real-world, or industrial, SAT instances are still unknown. The common wisdom in the SAT community is that these technique exploit some hidden structure of real-world problems.In this thesis, we characterize some important features of the underlying structure of industrial SAT instances. Namely, they are the community structure and the self-similar structure. We observe that most industrial SAT formulas, viewed as graphs, have these two properties. This means that (i) in a graph with a clear community structure, i.e. having high modularity, we can find a partition of its nodes into communities such that most edges connect nodes of the same community; and (ii) in a graph with a self-similar pattern, i.e. being fractal, its shape is kept after re-scalings, i.e., grouping sets of nodes into a single node. We also analyze how these structures are affected by the effects of CDCL techniques during the search.Using the previous structural studies, we propose three applications. First, we face the problem of generating pseudo-industrial random SAT instances using the notion of modularity. Our model generates instances similar to (classical) random SAT formulas when the modularity is low, but when this value is high, our model is also adequate to model realistic pseudo-industrial problems. Second, we propose a method based on the community structure of the instance to detect relevant learnt clauses. Our technique augments the original instance with this set of relevant clauses, and this results into an overall improvement of the efficiency of several state-of-the-art CDCL SAT solvers. Finally, we analyze the classification of industrial SAT instances into families using the previously analyzed structure features, and we compare them to other classifiers commonly used in portfolio SAT approaches.In summary, this dissertation extends the understandings of the structure of SAT instances, with the aim of better explaining the success of CDCL techniques and possibly improve them, and propose a number of applications based on this analysis of the underlying structure of SAT formulas.     

在形式验证和ATPG中的布尔可满足性问题

介绍布尔可满足性(SAT)求解程序在测试向量自动生成、符号模型检查、组合等价性检查和RTL电路设计验证等电子设计自动化领域中的应用．着重阐述如何在算法中有机地结合电路拓扑结构及其与特定应用相关的信息，以便提高问题求解效率．最后给出下一步可能的研究方向。     

SAT问题中局部搜索法的改进

局部搜索方法在求解SAT问题的高效率使其成为一研究热点．提出用初始概率的方法对局部搜索算法中变量的初始随机指派进行适当的约束．使在局部搜索的开始阶段,可满足的子句数大大增加,减少了翻转的次数,加快了求解的速度．用该方法对目前的一些重要的SAT问题的局部搜索算法(如WSAT,TSAT,NSAT,SDF等)进行改进,通过对不同规模的随机3-SAT问题的实例和一些不同规模的结构性SAT问题的实例,以及利用相变现象构造的难解SAT实例测试表明,改进后的这些局部搜索算法的求解效率有了很大的提高．该方法对其他局部搜索法的改进具有参考价值。     

An Effective Algorithm for the Futile Questioning Problem

In the futile questioning problem, one must decide whether acquisition of additional information can possibly lead to the proof of a conclusion. Solution of that problem demands evaluation of a quantified Boolean formula at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. The same evaluation problem, called Q-ALL SAT, arises in many other applications. In this paper, we introduce a special subclass of Q-ALL SAT that is at the first level of the polynomial hierarchy. We develop a solution algorithm for the general case that uses a backtracking search and a new form of learning of clauses. Results are reported for two sets of instances involving a robot route problem and a game problem. For these instances, the algorithm is substantially faster than state-of-the-art solvers for quantified Boolean formulas.     

A Parallelization Scheme Based on Work Stealing for a Class of SAT Solvers

Because of the inherent NP-completeness of SAT, many SAT problems currently cannot be solved in a reasonable time. Usually, in order to tackle a new class of SAT problems, new ad hoc algorithms must be designed. Another way to solve a new problem is to use a generic solver and employ parallelism to reduce the solve time. In this paper we propose a parallelization scheme for a class of SAT solvers based on the DPLL procedure. The scheme uses a dynamic load-balancing mechanism based on work-stealing techniques to deal with the irregularity of SAT problems. We parallelize Satz, one of the best generic SAT solvers, with our scheme to obtain a parallel solver called PSatz. The first experimental results on random 3-SAT problems and a set of well-known structured problems show the efficiency of PSatz. PSatz is freely available and runs on any networked workstations under Unix/Linux.     

随机k-SAT问题的回溯算法分析

通过研究搜索树的平均节点数,分析了回虎法求解随机ｋ－ＳＡＴ问题的平均复杂性,结果表明：找到实例所有的解或证明其无解所需的平均节九随变量数ｎ的增加而指数增长;随着ｒ的增大,求解将变得越来越容易,而且当ｒ趋近于无穷大时,以ｎ为指数。平均节点数的底数将无限地趋势于１。     

Guided Local Search for Solving SAT and Weighted MAX-SAT Problems

In this paper, we show how Guided Local Search (GLS) can be applied to the SAT problem and show how the resulting algorithm can be naturally extended to solve the weighted MAX-SAT problem. GLS is a general, penalty-based meta-heuristic, which sits on top of local search algorithms to help guide them out of local minima. GLS has been shown to be successful in solving a number of practical real-life problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, BT"s workforce scheduling problem, the radio link frequency assignment problem, and the vehicle routing problem. We present empirical results of applying GLS to instances of the SAT problem from the DIMACS archive and also a small set of weighted MAX-SAT problem instances and compare them with the results of other local search algorithms for the SAT problem.     

On SAT instance classes and a method for reliable performance experiments with SAT solvers

A recent series of experiments with a group of state-of-the-art SAT solvers and several well-defined classes of problem instances reports statistically significant performance variability for the solvers. A systematic analysis of the observed performance data, all openly archived on the Web, reveals distributions which we classify into three broad categories: (1) readily characterized with a simple ²-test, (2) requiring more in-depth analysis by a statistician, (3) incomplete, due to time-out limit reached by specific solvers. The first category includes two well-known distributions: normal and exponential; we use simple first-order criteria to decide the second category and label the distributions as near-normal, near-exponential and heavy-tail. We expect that good models for some if not most of these may be found with parameters that fit either generalized gamma, Weibull, or Pareto distributions. Our experiments show that most SAT solvers exhibit either normal or exponential distribution of execution time (runtime) on many equivalence classes of problem instances. This finding suggests that the basic mathematical framework for these experiments may well be the same as the one used to test the reliability or lifetime of hardware components such as lightbulbs, A/C units, etc. A batch of N replicated hardware components represents an equivalence class of N problem instances in SAT, a controlled operating environment A represents a SAT solver A, and the survival function (where x represents the lifetime) is the complement of the solvability function where x may represent runtime, implications, backtracks, etc. As demonstrated in the paper, a set of unrelated benchmarks or randomly generated SAT instances available today cannot measure the performance of SAT solvers reliably — there is no control on their hardness. However, equivalence class instances as defined in this paper are, in effect, replicated instances of a specific reference instance. The proposed method not only provides a common platform for a systematic study and a reliable improvement of deterministic and stochastic SAT solvers alike but also supports the introduction and validation of new problem instance classes.     

On SAT instance classes and a method for reliable performance experiments with SAT solvers

A recent series of experiments with a group of state-of-the-art SAT solvers and several well-defined classes of problem instances reports statistically significant performance variability for the solvers. A systematic analysis of the observed performance data, all openly archived on the Web, reveals distributions which we classify into three broad categories: (1) readily characterized with a simple ²-test, (2) requiring more in-depth analysis by a statistician, (3) incomplete, due to time-out limit reached by specific solvers. The first category includes two well-known distributions: normal and exponential; we use simple first-order criteria to decide the second category and label the distributions as near-normal, near-exponential and heavy-tail. We expect that good models for some if not most of these may be found with parameters that fit either generalized gamma, Weibull, or Pareto distributions. Our experiments show that most SAT solvers exhibit either normal or exponential distribution of execution time (runtime) on many equivalence classes of problem instances. This finding suggests that the basic mathematical framework for these experiments may well be the same as the one used to test the reliability or lifetime of hardware components such as lightbulbs, A/C units, etc. A batch of N replicated hardware components represents an equivalence class of N problem instances in SAT, a controlled operating environment A represents a SAT solver A, and the survival function R ^A (x) (where x represents the lifetime) is the complement of the solvability function S ^A (x)=1–R ^A (x) where x may represent runtime, implications, backtracks, etc. As demonstrated in the paper, a set of unrelated benchmarks or randomly generated SAT instances available today cannot measure the performance of SAT solvers reliably – there is no control on their 'hardness'. However, equivalence class instances as defined in this paper are, in effect, replicated instances of a specific reference instance. The proposed method not only provides a common platform for a systematic study and a reliable improvement of deterministic and stochastic SAT solvers alike but also supports the introduction and validation of new problem instance classes.     

Accelerating Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solving by common subclause elimination

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) is an important problem in many domains. Modern SAT solvers have been widely used in important industrial applications including automated planning and verification. To solve more problems in real applications, new techniques are needed to speed up SAT solving. Inspired by the success of common subexpression elimination in programming languages and other related areas, we study the impact of common subclause elimination (CSE) on SAT solving. Intensive experiments on many SAT solvers and benchmarks with 48-h timeout show that CSE can consistently improve SAT solving. Up to 5% more SAT13 instances can be solved after CSE. LZW-based CSE shows the best overall performance, particularly in the category of application benchmarks. A potential use of this result is that one may consider the heuristic of applying CSE to boost SAT solver performance on real life applications. Because of many possible ways to improve the benefit of CSE, we hope future research can unleash the full potential of CSE in SAT solving.     

Finding slid pairs in trivium with MiniSat

A pair of distinct (key, IV) is said to be slidable if they can produce two identical keystreams up to a shift. In this paper, we investigate slid pairs in Trivium. We convert the resulting nonlinear sliding equations into a SAT instance and use MiniSat, a SAT solver, to solve it. We not only find more slid pairs than previous result on slid pair in Trivium but also provide a new method which can treat higher clock-shifts and is much less time-consuming.     

Iterative and core-guided MaxSAT solving: A survey and assessment

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is an optimization version of SAT, and many real world applications can be naturally encoded as such. Solving MaxSAT is an important problem from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in developing efficient algorithms and several families of algorithms have been proposed. This paper overviews recent approaches to handle MaxSAT and presents a survey of MaxSAT algorithms based on iteratively calling a SAT solver which are particularly effective to solve problems arising in industrial settings. First, classic algorithms based on iteratively calling a SAT solver and updating a bound are overviewed. Such algorithms are referred to as iterative MaxSAT algorithms. Then, more sophisticated algorithms that additionally take advantage of unsatisfiable cores are described, which are referred to as core-guided MaxSAT algorithms. Core-guided MaxSAT algorithms use the information provided by unsatisfiable cores to relax clauses on demand and to create simpler constraints. Finally, a comprehensive empirical study on non-random benchmarks is conducted, including not only the surveyed algorithms, but also other state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers. The results indicate that (i) core-guided MaxSAT algorithms in general abort in less instances than classic solvers based on iteratively calling a SAT solver and that (ii) core-guided MaxSAT algorithms are fairly competitive compared to other approaches.     

求解SAT问题的拟人退火算法

该文利用一个简单的变换，将可满足性（SAT）问题转换为一个求相应目标函数最小值的优化问题，提出了一种用于跳出局部陷阱的拟人策略，基于模拟退火算法和拟人策略，为SAT问题的高效近注解得出了拟人退火算法（PA），该方法不仅具有模拟退火算法的全局收敛性质，而且具有一定的并行性，继承性。数值实验表明，对于本文随机产生的测试问题例，采用拟人策略的模拟退火算法的结果优于局部搜索算法，模拟退火算法以及近来国际上流行的WALKSAT算法，因此拟人退火算法是可行的和有效的。     

Solving constraint satisfaction problems with SAT modulo theories

Due to significant advances in SAT technology in the last years, its use for solving constraint satisfaction problems has been gaining wide acceptance. Solvers for satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) generalize SAT solving by adding the ability to handle arithmetic and other theories. Although there are results pointing out the adequacy of SMT solvers for solving CSPs, there are no available tools to extensively explore such adequacy. For this reason, in this paper we introduce a tool for translating FLATZINC (MINIZINC intermediate code) instances of CSPs to the standard SMT-LIB language. We provide extensive performance comparisons between state-of-the-art SMT solvers and most of the available FLATZINC solvers on standard FLATZINC problems. The obtained results suggest that state-of-the-art SMT solvers can be effectively used to solve CSPs.     

Adaptive memory-based local search for MAX-SAT

Many real world problems, such as circuit designing and planning, can be encoded into the maximum satisfiability problem (MAX-SAT). To solve MAX-SAT, many effective local search heuristic algorithms have been reported in the literature. This paper aims to study how useful information could be gathered during the search history and used to enhance local search heuristic algorithms. For this purpose, we present an adaptive memory-based local search heuristic (denoted by AMLS) for solving MAX-SAT. The AMLS algorithm uses several memory structures to define new rules for selecting the next variable to flip at each step and additional adaptive mechanisms and diversification strategies. The effectiveness and efficiency of our AMLS algorithm is evaluated on a large range of random and structured MAX-SAT and SAT instances, many of which are derived from real world applications. The computational results show that AMLS competes favorably, in terms of several criteria, with four state-of-the-art SAT and MAX-SAT solvers AdaptNovelty+, AdaptG2WSAT_p, IRoTS and RoTS.     

Relaxations of the Satisfiability Problem Using Semidefinite Programming

We derive a semidefinite relaxation of the satisfiability (SAT) problem and discuss its strength. We give both the primal and dual formulation of the relaxation. The primal formulation is an eigenvalue optimization problem, while the dual formulation is a semidefinite feasibility problem. We show that using the relaxation, a proof of the unsatisfiability of the notorious pigeonhole and mutilated chessboard problems can be computed in polynomial time. As a byproduct we find a new `sandwich" theorem that is similar to the sandwich theorem for Lovász' -function. Furthermore, the semidefinite relaxation gives a certificate of (un)satisfiability for 2SAT problems in polynomial time. By adding an objective function to the dual formulation, a specific class of polynomially solvable 3SAT instances can be identified. We conclude with discussing how the relaxation can be used to solve more general SAT problems and with some empirical observations.     

Extended clause learning

The past decade has seen clause learning as the most successful algorithm for SAT instances arising from real-world applications. This practical success is accompanied by theoretical results showing clause learning as equivalent in power to resolution. There exist, however, problems that are intractable for resolution, for which clause-learning solvers are hence doomed. In this paper, we present extended clause learning, a practical SAT algorithm that surpasses resolution in power. Indeed, we prove that it is equivalent in power to extended resolution, a proof system strictly more powerful than resolution. Empirical results based on an initial implementation suggest that the additional theoretical power can indeed translate into substantial practical gains.