Certifying Without Loss of Generality Reasoning in Solution-Improving Maximum Satisfiability

Authors Jeremias Berg , Bart Bogaerts , Jakob Nordström , Andy Oertel , Tobias Paxian , Dieter Vandesande



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Author Details

Jeremias Berg
  • Department of Computer Science, HIIT, Helsinki, Finland
  • University of Helsinki, Finland
Bart Bogaerts
  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Jakob Nordström
  • University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Lund University, Sweden
Andy Oertel
  • Lund University, Sweden
  • University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Tobias Paxian
  • University of Freiburg, Germany
Dieter Vandesande
  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Florian Pollitt and Mathias Fleury for their assistance with the CADICAL proof tracer and for fuzzing VeriPB within CADICAL. Their contributions were very helpful to further improve the robustness of the VeriPB toolchain. We also wish to acknowledge useful discussions with participants of the Dagstuhl workshop 23261 SAT Encodings and Beyond. The computational experiments were enabled by resources provided by LUNARC at Lund University.

Cite As Get BibTex

Jeremias Berg, Bart Bogaerts, Jakob Nordström, Andy Oertel, Tobias Paxian, and Dieter Vandesande. Certifying Without Loss of Generality Reasoning in Solution-Improving Maximum Satisfiability. In 30th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 307, pp. 4:1-4:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2024.4

Abstract

Proof logging has long been the established method to certify correctness of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers, but has only recently been introduced for SAT-based optimization (MaxSAT). The focus of this paper is solution-improving search (SIS), in which a SAT solver is iteratively queried for increasingly better solutions until an optimal one is found. A challenging aspect of modern SIS solvers is that they make use of complex "without loss of generality" arguments that are quite involved to understand even at a human meta-level, let alone to express in a simple, machine-verifiable proof.
In this work, we develop pseudo-Boolean proof logging methods for solution-improving MaxSAT solving, and use them to produce a certifying version of the state-of-the-art solver Pacose with VeriPB proofs. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that this approach works in practice. We hope that this is yet another step towards general adoption of proof logging in MaxSAT solving.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Automated reasoning
  • Theory of computation → Constraint and logic programming
  • Mathematics of computing → Combinatorial optimization
Keywords
  • proof logging
  • certifying algorithms
  • MaxSAT
  • solution-improving search
  • SAT-UNSAT
  • maximum satisfiability
  • combinatorial optimization
  • certification
  • pseudo-Boolean

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