Mechanical Verification of SAT Refutations with Extended Resolution

Chapter 2 Satisfiability Solvers

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT), the first problem proven to be NP-complete, is intractable on digital computers based on the von Neumann architecture. An efficient SAT solver can benefit many applications such as artificial intelligence, circuit design, and functional verification. Recently, a SAT solver approach based on a deterministic, continuous-time dynamical system (CTDS) was introduced [1]. This approach shows polynomial analog time-complexity on even the hardest k-SAT (k ≥ 3) problem instances, but at an energy cost dependent on exponentially growing auxiliary variables. This paper reports a novel analog hardware SAT solver, AC-SAT, implementing the CTDS via incorporating novel, analog circuit design ideas. AC-SAT is intended to be used as a co-processor and is programmable for handling different problem specifications. Furthermore, with its modular design, AC-SAT can be readily extended to solve larger size problems. SPICE simulation results show that AC-SAT can indeed solve the SAT problems, and it has speedup factors of ~10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">4</sup> on even the hardest 3-SAT problems, when compared with a state-of-the-art SAT solver on digital computers.

Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers are at the core of efficient approaches for solving a vast multitude of practical problems. Moreover, albeit targeting an NP-complete problem, SAT solvers are increasingly used for tackling problems beyond NP. Despite the success of SAT in practice, modeling with SAT and more importantly implementing SAT-based problem solving solutions is often a difficult and error-prone task. This paper proposes the PySAT toolkit, which enables fast Python-based prototyping using SAT oracles and SAT-related technology. PySAT provides a simple API for working with a few state-of-the-art SAT oracles and also integrates a number of cardinality constraint encodings, all aiming at simplifying the prototyping process. Experimental results presented in the paper show that PySAT-based implementations can be as efficient as those written in a low-level language.

Multiway Decision Graph (MDG) is a canonical representation of a subset of many-sorted first-order logic. It generalizes the logic of equality with abstract types and uninterpreted function symbols. The area of Satisfiability (SAT) ha s been the subject of intensive research in recent years, with significant theoretical and practical contributions. From a practical perspective, a large number of very effective SAT solvers have recently been proposed, most of which based on improvements made to the original Davis-Putnam algorithm. Local search algorithms have allowed solving extremely large satisfiable instances of SAT. The combination between various verification methodologies will enhance the capabilities of each and overcome their limitations. In this paper, we introduce a model checking methodology for MDG based models using MDG tool and SAT solver. We use SAT solver searching for feasible paths of reachable states satisfying the property under certain encoding constraints. Finally, we provide a case study showing the correctness and the efficiency of our approach.

Modern satisfiability (SAT) solvers provide an efficient implementation of classical propositional logic. Their input language, however, is based on the conjunctive normal form (CNF) of propositional formulas. To use SAT solver technology in practice, a user must create the input clauses in one way or another. A typical approach is to write a procedural program that generates formulas on the basis of some input data relevant for the problem domain and translates them into CNF. In this paper, we propose a declarative approach where the intended clauses are specified in terms of rules in analogy to answer set programming (ASP). This allows the user to write first-order specifications for intended clauses in a schematic way by exploiting term variables. We develop a formal framework required to define the semantics of such specifications. Moreover, we provide an implementation harnessing state-of-the-art ASP grounders to accomplish the grounding step of clauses. As a result, we obtain a general-purpose clause-level grounding approach for SAT solvers. Finally, we illustrate the capabilities of our specification methodology in terms of combinatorial and application problems.

Query-answering (QA) problems have attracted wider interest recently, owing partly to emerging applications involving integration between rules and ontologies in the Semantic Web's layered architecture. Success of using satisfiability (SAT) solvers as low-level solvers for dealing with several kinds of problems motivates us to apply SAT solvers to a class of QA problems. To find all elements of an answer set, a variant of a usual SAT solver, called an all-solution satisfiability (All-SAT) solver, is used for determining all models of a given input set of propositional clauses. Using an All-SAT solver, we propose a procedure for solving QA problems. The procedure generates input for an All-SAT solver from a high-level description of a given QA problem by problem transformation in a clause space that includes set-bounded variables. Based on the equivalent transformation principle, the correctness of the proposed procedure is shown.

Automatic construction of parallel portfolios via algorithm configuration

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.

Many formal verification tools today are based on Boolean proof techniques. The two most powerful approaches in this context are binary decision diagrams (BDDs) and methods based on Boolean satisfiability (SAT). Recent studies have shown that BDDs and SAT are orthogonal, i.e. there exist problems where BDDs work well, while SAT solvers fail and vice versa. Beside this, the techniques are very different in general. E.g. SAT solvers try to find a single solution and BDDs represent all solutions in parallel. In this paper the first integrated approach is presented that combines BDDs and SAT within a single data structure. This hybrid approach combines the advantages of the two techniques, i.e. multiple solutions can be computed while the memory requirement remains small. First experimental results demonstrate the quality of the approach in comparison to BDDs and SAT solvers.

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers are popular engines used throughout the verification world. Bounded sequential problems such as bounded model checking and bounded sequential equivalence checking rely on fast and robust SAT solvers. In this work, we introduce a technique that improves the performance of the underlying SAT solver for bounded sequential problems by taking advantage of a design's don't care states. We develop cost effective methods of filtering, replicating and applying the don't care states to the original problem thus reducing the search space. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on ISCAS'89 benchmarks.

Maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT), employing propositional logic as the declarative language of choice, has turned into a viable approach to solving NP-hard optimization problems arising from artificial intelligence and other real-world settings. A key contributing factor to the success of MaxSAT is the rise of increasingly effective exact solvers that are based on iterative calls to a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver. The three types of SAT-based MaxSAT solving approaches, each with its distinguishing features, implemented in current state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers are the core-guided, the implicit hitting set (IHS), and the objective-bounding approaches. The objective-bounding approach is based on directly searching over the objective function range by iteratively querying a SAT solver if the MaxSAT instance at hand has a solution under different bounds on the objective. In contrast, both core-guided and IHS are so-called unsatisfiability-based approaches that employ a SAT solver as an unsatisfiable core extractor to determine sources of inconsistencies, but critically differ in how the found unsatisfiable cores are made use of towards finding a provably optimal solution. Furthermore, a variety of different algorithmic variants of the core-guided approach in particular have been proposed and implemented in solvers. It is well-acknowledged that each of the three approaches has its advantages and disadvantages, which is also witnessed by instance and problem-domain specific runtime performance differences (and at times similarities) of MaxSAT solvers implementing variants of the approaches. However, the questions of to what extent the approaches are fundamentally different and how the benefits of the individual methods could be combined in a single algorithmic approach are currently not fully understood. In this work, we approach these questions by developing UniMaxSAT, a general unifying algorithmic framework. Based on the recent notion of abstract cores, UniMaxSAT captures in general core-guided, IHS and objective-bounding computations. The framework offers a unified way of establishing quite generally the correctness of the current approaches. We illustrate this by formally showing that UniMaxSAT can simulate the computations of various algorithmic instantiations of the three types of MaxSAT solving approaches. Furthermore, UniMaxSAT can be instantiated in novel ways giving rise to new algorithmic variants of the approaches. We illustrate this aspect by developing a prototype implementation of an algorithmic variant for MaxSAT based on the framework.

The problem of finding the minimum three-dimensional Kochen–Specker (KS) vector system, an important problem in quantum foundations, has remained open for over 55 years. We present a new method to address this problem based on a combination of a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver and a computer algebra system (CAS). Our approach improved the lower bound on the size of a KS system from 22 to 24. More importantly, we provide the first computer-verifiable proof certificate of a lower bound to the KS problem with a proof size of 41.6 TiB for order 23. The efficiency is due to the powerful combination of SAT solvers and CAS-based orderly generation.

Encoding combinatorial problems in terms of propositional satisfiability (SAT) enables utilization of highly efficient SAT solvers for combinatorial search. Local search preprocessing accelerates the SAT solver's search by providing high-quality starting points, a technique implemented in several modern SAT solvers. However, existing preprocessing methods employ generic strategies that fail to exploit the structural patterns inherent in problem encodings. This position paper proposes a novel paradigm wherein Large Language Models (LLMs) analyze problem encoding implementations to synthesize specialized preprocessing algorithms. The LLMs examine Python-based code to identify structural patterns, enabling the automatic generation of encoding-specific local search procedures. These procedures operate across all instances sharing the same encoding scheme rather than requiring instance-specific customization. Our preliminary empirical evaluation demonstrates effective automated algorithm synthesis for structure-aware SAT preprocessing, serving as a foundation for similar approaches across multiple domains of combinatorial optimization.

The formulation of a Propositional Satisfiability (SAT) problem instance is vital to efficient solving. This has motivated research on preprocessing, and inprocessing techniques where reformulation of a SAT instance is interleaved with solving. Preprocessing and inprocessing are highly effective in extending the reach of SAT solvers, however they necessarily operate on the lowest level representation of the problem, the raw SAT clauses, where higher-level patterns are difficult and/or costly to identify. Our approach is different: rather than reformulate the SAT representation directly, we apply automated reformulations to a higher level representation (a constraint model) of the original problem. Common Subexpression Elimination (CSE) is a family of techniques to improve automatically the formulation of constraint satisfaction problems, which are often highly beneficial when using a conventional constraint solver. In this work we demonstrate that CSE has similar benefits when the reformulated constraint model is encoded to SAT and solved using a state-of-the-art SAT solver. In some cases we observe speed improvements of over 100 times.KeywordsConstraint ModelNegation Normal FormImplied ConstraintCommon Subexpression EliminationGlobal Cardinality ConstraintThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Efficient solutions to nonpolynomial (NP)-complete problems would significantly benefit both science and industry. However, such problems are intractable on digital computers based on the von Neumann architecture, thus creating the need for alternative solutions to tackle such problems. Recently, a deterministic, continuous-time dynamical system (CTDS) was proposed [1] to solve a representative NP-complete problem, Boolean Satisfiability (SAT). This solver shows polynomial analog time-complexity on even the hardest benchmark $k$ -SAT ( $k \geq 3$ ) formulas, but at an energy cost through exponentially driven auxiliary variables. This paper presents a novel analog hardware SAT solver, AC-SAT , implementing the CTDS via incorporating novel, analog circuit design ideas. AC-SAT is intended to be used as a coprocessor and is programmable for handling different problem specifications. It is especially effective for solving hard $k$ -SAT problem instances that are challenging for algorithms running on digital machines. Furthermore, with its modular design, AC-SAT can readily be extended to solve larger size problems, while the size of the circuit grows linearly with the product of the number of variables and the number of clauses. The circuit is designed and simulated based on a 32-nm CMOS technology. Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) simulation results show speedup factors of ~104 on even the hardest 3-SAT problems, when compared with a state-of-the-art SAT solver on digital computers. As an example, for hard problems with $N=50$ variables and $M=212$ clauses, solutions are found within from a few nanoseconds to a few hundred nanoseconds.