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 Constraint-Based Reasoning


Constrained Decoding for Robotics Foundation Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in the development of robotic foundation models have led to promising end-to-end and general-purpose capabilities in robotic systems. Trained on vast datasets of simulated and real-world trajectories, these models map multimodal observations directly to action sequences for physical execution. Despite promising real-world capabilities, these models are still data-driven and, therefore, lack explicit notions of behavioral correctness. We address this gap by introducing SafeDec, a constrained decoding framework for autoregressive, robot foundation models that enforces invariant safety specifications on candidate action trajectories. Task-specific safety rules are expressed as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulas and are enforced at inference time with minimal overhead. Our method ensures that generated actions provably satisfy STL specifications under assumed dynamics at runtime without retraining , while remaining agnostic of the underlying policy. We evaluate SafeDec on tasks from the CHORES benchmark for state-of-the-art generalist policies (e.g., SPOC, Flare, PoliFormer) across hundreds of procedurally generated environments and show that our decoding-time interventions are useful not only for filtering unsafe actions but also for conditional action generation. Videos are available at constrained-robot-fms.github.io.


Overcoming Over-Fitting in Constraint Acquisition via Query-Driven Interactive Refinement

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Manual modeling in Constraint Programming is a substantial bottleneck, which Constraint Acquisition (CA) aims to automate. However, passive CA methods are prone to over-fitting, often learning models that include spurious global constraints when trained on limited data, while purely active methods can be query-intensive. We introduce a hybrid CA framework specifically designed to address the challenge of over-fitting in CA. Our approach integrates passive learning for initial candidate generation, a query-driven interactive refinement phase that utilizes probabilistic confidence scores (initialized by machine learning priors) to systematically identify over-fitted constraints, and a specialized subset exploration mechanism to recover valid substructures from rejected candidates. A final active learning phase ensures model completeness. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our interactive refinement phase is crucial for achieving high target model coverage and overall model accuracy from limited examples, doing so with manageable query complexity. This framework represents a substantial advancement towards robust and practical constraint acquisition in data-limited scenarios.


RsGCN: Subgraph-Based Rescaling Enhances Generalization of GCNs for Solving Traveling Salesman Problems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

GCN-based traveling salesman problem (TSP) solvers face two critical challenges: poor cross-scale generalization for TSPs and high training costs. To address these challenges, we propose a Subgraph-Based Rescaling Graph Convolu-tional Network (RsGCN). Focusing on the scale-dependent features (i.e., features varied with problem scales) related to nodes and edges, we design the subgraph-based rescaling to normalize edge lengths of subgraphs. Under a unified subgraph perspective, RsGCN can efficiently learn scale-generalizable representations from small-scale TSPs at low cost. To exploit and assess the heatmaps generated by Rs-GCN, we design a Reconstruction-Based Search (RBS), in which a reconstruction process based on adaptive weight is incorporated to help avoid local optima. Based on a combined architecture of RsGCN and RBS, our solver achieves remarkable generalization and low training cost: with only 3 epochs of training on a mixed-scale dataset containing instances with up to 100 nodes, it can be generalized successfully to 10K-node instances without any fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate our advanced performance across uniform-distribution instances of 9 different scales from 20 to 10K nodes and 78 real-world instances from TSPLIB, while requiring the fewest learnable parameters and training epochs among neural competitors. Background The traveling salesman problem (TSP), as a typical combinatorial optimization problem, has been extensively studied in the literature.


Compiling by Proving: Language-Agnostic Automatic Optimization from Formal Semantics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Verification proofs encode complete program behavior, yet we discard them after checking correctness. We present compiling by proving, a paradigm that transforms these proofs into optimized execution rules. By constructing All-Path Reachability Proofs through symbolic execution and compiling their graph structure, we consolidate many semantic rewrites into single rules while preserving correctness by construction. We implement this as a language-agnostic extension to the K framework. Evaluation demonstrates performance improvements across different compilation scopes: opcode-level optimizations show consistent speedups, while whole-program compilation achieves orders of magnitude greater performance gains.




Learning Ising Models under Hard Constraints using One Sample

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of estimating inverse temperature parameter $ฮฒ$ of an $n$-dimensional truncated Ising model using a single sample. Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ with $n$ vertices, a truncated Ising model is a probability distribution over the $n$-dimensional hypercube $\{-1,1\}^n$ where each configuration $\mathbfฯƒ$ is constrained to lie in a truncation set $S \subseteq \{-1,1\}^n$ and has probability $\Pr(\mathbfฯƒ) \propto \exp(ฮฒ\mathbfฯƒ^\top A\mathbfฯƒ)$ with $A$ being the adjacency matrix of $G$. We adopt the recent setting of [Galanis et al. SODA'24], where the truncation set $S$ can be expressed as the set of satisfying assignments of a $k$-SAT formula. Given a single sample $\mathbfฯƒ$ from a truncated Ising model, with inverse parameter $ฮฒ^*$, underlying graph $G$ of bounded degree $ฮ”$ and $S$ being expressed as the set of satisfying assignments of a $k$-SAT formula, we design in nearly $O(n)$ time an estimator $\hatฮฒ$ that is $O(ฮ”^3/\sqrt{n})$-consistent with the true parameter $ฮฒ^*$ for $k \gtrsim \log(d^2k)ฮ”^3.$ Our estimator is based on the maximization of the pseudolikelihood, a notion that has received extensive analysis for various probabilistic models without [Chatterjee, Annals of Statistics '07] or with truncation [Galanis et al. SODA '24]. Our approach generalizes recent techniques from [Daskalakis et al. STOC '19, Galanis et al. SODA '24], to confront the more challenging setting of the truncated Ising model.


Systematic Constraint Formulation and Collision-Free Trajectory Planning Using Space-Time Graphs of Convex Sets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we create optimal, collision-free, time-dependent trajectories through cluttered dynamic environments. The many spatial and temporal constraints make finding an initial guess for a numerical solver difficult. Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS) and the recently developed Space-Time Graphs of Convex Sets (ST-GCS) enable us to generate minimum distance collision-free trajectories without providing an initial guess to the solver. We also explore the derivation of general GCS-compatible constraints and document an intuitive strategy for adapting general constraints to the framework. We show that ST-GCS produces equivalent trajectories to the standard GCS formulation when the environment is static, as well as globally optimal trajectories in cluttered dynamic environments.


Feature Augmentation of GNNs for ILPs: Local Uniqueness Suffices

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Integer Linear Programs (ILPs) are central to real-world optimizations but notoriously difficult to solve. Learning to Optimize (L2O) has emerged as a promising paradigm, with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) serving as the standard backbone. However, standard anonymous GNNs are limited in expressiveness for ILPs, and the common enhancement of augmenting nodes with globally unique identifiers (UIDs) typically introduces spurious correlations that severely harm generalization. To address this tradeoff, we propose a parsimonious Local-UID scheme based on d-hop uniqueness coloring, which ensures identifiers are unique only within each node's d-hop neighborhood. Building on this scheme, we introduce ColorGNN, which incorporates color information via color-conditioned embeddings, and ColorUID, a lightweight feature-level variant. We prove that for d-layer networks, Local-UIDs achieve the expressive power of Global-UIDs while offering stronger generalization. Extensive experiments show that our approach (i) yields substantial gains on three ILP benchmarks, (ii) exhibits strong OOD generalization on linear programming datasets, and (iii) further improves a general graph-level task when paired with a state-of-the-art method.


Virtual Arc Consistency for Linear Constraints in Cost Function Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--In Constraint Programming, solving discrete minimization problems with hard and soft constraints can be done either using (i) soft global constraints, (ii) a reformulation into a linear program, or (iii) a reformulation into local cost functions. Conversely, the approach (ii) provides a global view with strong bounds, but the size of the reformulation can be problematic. We focus on approach (iii) in which soft arc consistency (SAC) algorithms produce bounds of intermediate quality. Recently, the introduction of linear constraints as local cost functions increases their modeling expressiveness. We adapt an existing SAC algorithm to handle linear constraints. We show that our algorithm significantly improves the lower bounds compared to the original algorithm on several benchmarks, reducing solving time in some cases. Graphical models provide a powerful framework for modeling a variety of combinatorial problems, addressing tasks that range from satisfaction problems to probabilistic models. They employ local functions defined over'small' subset of variables to represent diverse interactions among them. For example, to model the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) [2], each local function is a constraint evaluating to true (satisfied) or false (falsified).