We study the task of smoothing a circuit, i.e., ensuring that all children of a plus-gate mention the same variables. Circuits serve as the building blocks of state-of-the-art inference algorithms on discrete probabilistic graphical models and probabilistic programs. They are also important for discrete density estimation algorithms. Many of these tasks require the input circuit to be smooth. However, smoothing has not been studied in its own right yet, and only a trivial quadratic algorithm is known. This paper studies efficient smoothing for structured decomposable circuits. We propose a near-linear time algorithm for this task and explore lower bounds for smoothing general circuits, using existing results on range-sum queries. Further, for the important special case of All-Marginals, we show a more efficient linear-time algorithm. We validate experimentally the performance of our methods.

We show new limits on the efficiency of using current techniques to make exact probabilistic inference for large classes of natural problems. In particular we show new lower bounds on knowledge compilation to SDD and DNNF forms. We give strong lower bounds on the complexity of SDD representations by relating SDD size to best-partition communication complexity. We use this relationship to prove exponential lower bounds on the SDD size for representing a large class of problems that occur naturally as queries over probabilistic databases. A consequence is that for representing unions of conjunctive queries, SDDs are not qualitatively more concise than OBDDs. We also derive simple examples for which SDDs must be exponentially less concise than FBDDs. Finally, we derive exponential lower bounds on the sizes of DNNF representations using a new quasipolynomial simulation of DNNFs by nondeterministic FBDDs.

Propositional satisfiability (SAT) solvers based on conflict directed clause learning (CDCL) implicitly produce resolution refutations of unsatisfiable formulas. The precise class of formulas for which they can produce polynomial size refutations has been the subject of several studies, with special focus on the clause learning aspect of these solvers. The results, however, assume the use of non-standard and non-asserting learning schemes, or rely on polynomially many restarts for simulating individual steps of a resolution refutation, or work with a theoretical model that significantly deviates from certain key aspects of all modern CDCL solvers such as learning only one asserting clause from each conflict and other techniques such as conflict guided backjumping and phase saving. We study non-restarting CDCL solvers that learn only one asserting clause per conflict and show that, with simple preprocessing that depends only on the number of variables of the input formula, such solvers can polynomially simulate resolution. We show, moreover, that this preprocessing allows one to convert any CDCL solver to one that is non-restarting.