An elegant approach to learning temporal orderings from texts is to formulate this problem as a constraint optimization problem, which can be then given an exact solution using Integer Linear Programming. This works well for cases where the number of possible relations between temporal entities is restricted to the mere precedence relation [Bramsen et al., 2006; Chambers and Jurafsky, 2008], but becomes impractical when considering all possible interval relations. This paper proposes two innovations, inspired from work on temporal reasoning, that control this combinatorial blow-up, therefore rendering an exact ILP inference viable in the general case. First, we translate our network of constraints from temporal intervals to their endpoints, to handle a drastically smaller set of constraints, while preserving the same temporal information. Second, we show that additional efficiency is gained by enforcing coherence on particular subsets of the entire temporal graphs. We evaluate these innovations through various experiments on TimeBank 1.2, and compare our ILP formulations with various baselines and oracle systems.

We investigate (quantifier-free) spatial constraint languages with equality, contact and connectedness predicates as well as Boolean operations on regions, interpreted over low-dimensional Euclidean spaces. We show that the complexity of reasoning varies dramatically depending on the dimension of the space and on the type of regions considered. For example, the logic with the interior-connectedness predicate (and without contact) is undecidable over polygons or regular closed sets in the Euclidean plane, NP-complete over regular closed sets in three-dimensional Euclidean space, and ExpTime-complete over polyhedra in three-dimensional Euclidean space.

Temporal reasoning problems arise in many areas of AI, including planning, natural language understanding, and reasoning about physical systems. The computational complexity of continuous-time temporal constraint reasoning is fairly well understood. There are, however, many different cases where discrete time must be considered; various scheduling problems and reasoning about sampled physical systems are two examples. Here, the complexity of temporal reasoning is not as well-studied nor as well-understood. In order to get a better understanding, we consider the powerful Horn DLR formalism adapted for discrete time and study its computational complexity. We show that the full formalism is NP-hard and identify several maximal tractable subclasses. We also ‘lift’ the maximality results to obtain hardness results for other families of constraints. Finally, we discuss how the results and techniques presented in this paper can be used for studying even more expressive classes of temporal constraints.

A tree decomposition We construct an homogeneous (and ω-categorical) of a constraint network is a tree decomposition of its constraint representation of the relation algebra RCC8, which graph: roughly speaking, a decomposition defines a is one of the fundamental formalisms for spatial set of subnetworks that can be glued together in a treelike reasoning. As a consequence we obtain that the manner. The width of such a decomposition, then, is the size network consistency problem for RCC8 can be of the largest subnetwork in the decomposition (in terms of solved in polynomial time for networks of bounded the variables in the network).

This paper considers matrix models, a class of CSPs which generally exhibit significant symmetries. It proposed the idea of LexLeader feasibility checkers that verify, during search, whether the current partial assignment can be extended into a canonical solution. The feasibility checkers are based on a novel result by [Katsirelos et al., 2010] on how to check efficiently whether a solution is canonical. The paper generalizes this result to partial assignments, various variable orderings, and value symmetries. Empirical results on 5 standard benchmarks shows that feasibility checkers may bring significant performance gains, when jointly used with DoubleLex or SnakeLex.

Heuristics are crucial tools in decreasing search effort in varied fields of AI. In order to be effective, a heuristic must be efficient to compute, as well as provide useful information to the search algorithm. However, some well-known heuristics which do well in reducing backtracking are so heavy that the gain of deploying them in a search algorithm might be outweighed by their overhead. We propose a rational metareasoning approach to decide when to deploy heuristics, using CSP backtracking search as a case study. In particular, a value of information approach is taken to adaptive deployment of solution-count estimation heuristics for value ordering. Empirical results show that indeed the proposed mechanism successfully balances the tradeoff between decreasing backtracking and heuristic computational overhead, resulting in a significant overall search time reduction.

This paper introduces the Seqbin meta-constraint with a polytime algorithm achieving generalized arc-consistency. Seqbin can be used for encoding counting constraints such as Change, Smooth, or InncreasingNValue. For all of them the time and space complexity is linear in the sum of domain sizes, which improves or equals the best known results of the literature.

Many systems use Markov models to generate finite-length sequences that imitate a given style. These systems often need to enforce specific control constraints on the sequences to generate. Unfortunately, control constraints are not compatible with Markov models, as they induce long-range dependencies that violate the Markov hypothesis of limited memory. Attempts to solve this issue using heuristic search do not give any guarantee on the nature and probability of the sequences generated. We propose a novel and efficient approach to controlled Markov generation for a specific class of control constraints that 1) guarantees that generated sequences satisfy control constraints and 2) follow the statistical distribution of the initial Markov model. Revisiting Markov generation in the framework of constraint satisfaction, we show how constraints can be compiled into a non-homogeneous Markov model, using arc-consistency techniques and renormalization. We illustrate the approach on a melody generation problem and sketch some realtime applications in which control constraints are given by gesture controllers.

We introduce the MULTI-INTER-DISTANCE constraint that ensures no more than m variables are assigned to values lying in a window of p consecutive values. This constraint is useful for modeling scheduling problems where tasks of processing time p compete for m identical resources. We present a propagator that achieves bounds consistency in cubic time. Experiments show that this new constraint offers a much stronger filtering than an edge-finder and that it allows to solve larger instances of the runway scheduling problem.

Special-purpose constraint propagation algorithms (such as those for the element constraint) frequently make implicit use of short supports — by examining a subset of the variables, they can infer support for all other variables and values and save substantial work. However, to date general purpose propagation algorithms (such as GAC-Schema) rely upon supports involving all variables. We demonstrate how to employ short supports in a new general purpose propagation algorithm called ShortGAC. This works when provided with either an explicit list of allowed short tuples, or a function to calculate the next supporting short tuple. Empirical analyses demonstrate the efficiency of ShortGAC compared to other general-purpose propagation algorithms. In some cases ShortGAC even exhibits similar performance to special-purpose propagators.