cliquewidth
Extended Version of: On the Structural Hardness of Answer Set Programming: Can Structure Efficiently Confine the Power of Disjunctions?
Hecher, Markus, Kiesel, Rafael
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a generic problem modeling and solving framework with a strong focus on knowledge representation and a rapid growth of industrial applications. So far, the study of complexity resulted in characterizing hardness and determining their sources, fine-grained insights in the form of dichotomy-style results, as well as detailed parameterized complexity landscapes. Unfortunately, for the well-known parameter treewidth disjunctive programs require double-exponential runtime under reasonable complexity assumptions. This quickly becomes out of reach. We deal with the classification of structural parameters for disjunctive ASP on the program's rule structure (incidence graph). First, we provide a polynomial kernel to obtain single-exponential runtime in terms of vertex cover size, despite subset-minimization being not represented in the program's structure. Then we turn our attention to strictly better structural parameters between vertex cover size and treewidth. Here, we provide double-exponential lower bounds for the most prominent parameters in that range: treedepth, feedback vertex size, and cliquewidth. Based on this, we argue that unfortunately our options beyond vertex cover size are limited. Our results provide an in-depth hardness study, relying on a novel reduction from normal to disjunctive programs, trading the increase of complexity for an exponential parameter compression.
Decidability of Querying First-Order Theories via Countermodels of Finite Width
Feller, Thomas, Lyon, Tim S., Ostropolski-Nalewaja, Piotr, Rudolph, Sebastian
We propose a generic framework for establishing the decidability of a wide range of logical entailment problems (briefly called querying), based on the existence of countermodels that are structurally simple, gauged by certain types of width measures (with treewidth and cliquewidth as popular examples). As an important special case of our framework, we identify logics exhibiting width-finite finitely universal model sets, warranting decidable entailment for a wide range of homomorphism-closed queries, subsuming a diverse set of practically relevant query languages. As a particularly powerful width measure, we propose Blumensath's partitionwidth, which subsumes various other commonly considered width measures and exhibits highly favorable computational and structural properties. Focusing on the formalism of existential rules as a popular showcase, we explain how finite-partitionwidth sets of rules subsume other known abstract decidable classes but - leveraging existing notions of stratification - also cover a wide range of new rulesets. We expose natural limitations for fitting the class of finite-unification sets into our picture and provide several options for remedy.
Ontology-Mediated Querying on Databases of Bounded Cliquewidth
Lutz, Carsten, Sabellek, Leif, Schulze, Lukas
We study the evaluation of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) on databases of bounded cliquewidth from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity theory. As the ontology language, we consider the description logics $\mathcal{ALC}$ and $\mathcal{ALCI}$ as well as the guarded two-variable fragment GF$_2$ of first-order logic. Queries are atomic queries (AQs), conjunctive queries (CQs), and unions of CQs. All studied OMQ problems are fixed-parameter linear (FPL) when the parameter is the size of the OMQ plus the cliquewidth. Our main contribution is a detailed analysis of the dependence of the running time on the parameter, exhibiting several interesting effects.
Finite-Cliquewidth Sets of Existential Rules: Toward a General Criterion for Decidable yet Highly Expressive Querying
Feller, Thomas, Lyon, Tim S., Ostropolski-Nalewaja, Piotr, Rudolph, Sebastian
In our pursuit of generic criteria for decidable ontology-based querying, we introduce 'finite-cliquewidth sets' (FCS) of existential rules, a model-theoretically defined class of rule sets, inspired by the cliquewidth measure from graph theory. By a generic argument, we show that FCS ensures decidability of entailment for a sizable class of queries (dubbed 'DaMSOQs') subsuming conjunctive queries (CQs). The FCS class properly generalizes the class of finite-expansion sets (FES), and for signatures of arity at most 2, the class of bounded-treewidth sets (BTS). For higher arities, BTS is only indirectly subsumed by FCS by means of reification. Despite the generality of FCS, we provide a rule set with decidable CQ entailment (by virtue of first-order-rewritability) that falls outside FCS, thus demonstrating the incomparability of FCS and the class of finite-unification sets (FUS). In spite of this, we show that if we restrict ourselves to single-headed rule sets over signatures of arity at most 2, then FCS subsumes FUS.
Graph Width Measures for CNF-Encodings with Auxiliary Variables
Mengel, Stefan (CNRS, CRIL) | Wallon, Romain
We consider bounded width CNF-formulas where the width is measured by popular graph width measures on graphs associated to CNF-formulas. Such restricted graph classes, in particular those of bounded treewidth, have been extensively studied for their uses in the design of algorithms for various computational problems on CNF-formulas. Here we consider the expressivity of these formulas in the model of clausal encodings with auxiliary variables. We first show that bounding the width for many of the measures from the literature leads to a dramatic loss of expressivity, restricting the formulas to those of low communication complexity. We then show that the width of optimal encodings with respect to different measures is strongly linked: there are two classes of width measures, one containing primal treewidth and the other incidence cliquewidth, such that in each class the width of optimal encodings only differs by constant factors. Moreover, between the two classes the width differs at most by a factor logarithmic in the number of variables. Both these results are in stark contrast to the setting without auxiliary variables where all width measures we consider here differ by more than constant factors and in many cases even by linear factors.
Revisiting Graph Width Measures for CNF-Encodings
Mengel, Stefan, Wallon, Romain
We consider bounded width CNF-formulas where the width is measured by popular graph width measures on graphs associated to CNF-formulas. Such restricted graph classes, in particular those of bounded treewidth, have been extensively studied for their uses in the design of algorithms for various computational problems on CNF-formulas. Here we consider the expressivity of these formulas in the model of clausal encodings with auxiliary variables. We first show that bounding the width for many of the measures from the literature leads to a dramatic loss of expressivity, restricting the formulas to such of low communication complexity. We then show that the width of optimal encodings with respect to different measures is strongly linked: there are two classes of width measures, one containing primal treewidth and the other incidence cliquewidth, such that in each class the width of optimal encodings only differs by constant factors. Moreover, between the two classes the width differs at most by a factor logarithmic in the number of variables. Both these results are in stark contrast to the setting without auxiliary variables where all width measures we consider here differ by more than constant factors and in many cases even by linear factors.
A Sufficiently Fast Algorithm for Finding Close to Optimal Junction Trees
An algorithm is developed for finding a close to optimal junction tree of a given graph G. The algorithm has a worst case complexity O(c^k n^a) where a and c are constants, n is the number of vertices, and k is the size of the largest clique in a junction tree of G in which this size is minimized. The algorithm guarantees that the logarithm of the size of the state space of the heaviest clique in the junction tree produced is less than a constant factor off the optimal value. When k = O(log n), our algorithm yields a polynomial inference algorithm for Bayesian networks.