State-of-the-art SAT solvers are nowadays able to handle huge real-world instances. The key to this success is the so-called Conflict-Driven Clause-Learning (CDCL) scheme, which encompasses a number of techniques that exploit the conflicts that are encountered during the search for a solution. In this article we extend these techniques to Integer Linear Programming (ILP), where variables may take general integer values instead of purely binary ones, constraints are more expressive than just propositional clauses, and there may be an objective function to optimise. We explain how these methods can be implemented efficiently, and discuss possible improvements. Our work is backed with a basic implementation that shows that, even in this far less mature stage, our techniques are already a useful complement to the state of the art in ILP solving.

Modern CDCL SAT solvers learn clauses rapidly, and an important heuristic is the clause deletion scheme. Most current solvers have two (or more) stores of clauses. One has ``valuable'' clauses which are never deleted. Most learned clauses are added to the other, with an aggressive deletion strategy to restrict its size. Recent solvers in the MapleSAT family, have comparatively complex deletion scheme, and perform well. Many solvers store only binary clauses permanently, but MapleLCMDistChronoBT stores clauses with small LBD permanently. We report an experimental study of the permanent clause store in MapleLCMDistChronoBT. We observe that this store can get quite large, but several methods for limiting its size reduced performance. We also show that alternate size and LBD based criteria improve performance, while still having large permanent stores. In particular, saving clauses up to size 8, and adding small numbers of high-centrality clauses, both improved performance, with the best improvement using both methods.

Propositional satisfiability (SAT) is an NP-complete problem that impacts many research fields, such as planning, verification, and security. Despite the remarkable success of modern SAT solvers, scalability still remains a challenge. Main stream modern SAT solvers are based on the Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) algorithm. Recent work aimed to enhance CDCL SAT solvers by improving its variable branching heuristics through predictions generated by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, so far this approach either has not made solving more effective, or has required frequent online accesses to substantial GPU resources. Aiming to make GNN improvements practical, this paper proposes an approach called NeuroComb, which builds on two insights: (1) predictions of important variables and clauses can be combined with dynamic branching into a more effective hybrid branching strategy, and (2) it is sufficient to query the neural model only once for the predictions before the SAT solving starts. Implemented as an enhancement to the classic MiniSat solver, NeuroComb allowed it to solve 18.5% more problems on the recent SATCOMP-2020 competition problem set. NeuroComb is therefore a practical approach to improving SAT solving through modern machine learning.

Current implementations of pseudo-Boolean (PB) solvers working on native PB constraints are based on the CDCL architecture which empowers highly efficient modern SAT solvers. In particular, such PB solvers not only implement a (cutting-planes-based) conflict analysis procedure, but also complementary strategies for components that are crucial for the efficiency of CDCL, namely branching heuristics, learned constraint deletion and restarts. However, these strategies are mostly reused by PB solvers without considering the particular form of the PB constraints they deal with. In this paper, we present and evaluate different ways of adapting CDCL strategies to take the specificities of PB constraints into account while preserving the behavior they have in the clausal setting. We implemented these strategies in two different solvers, namely Sat4j (for which we consider three configurations) and RoundingSat. Our experiments show that these dedicated strategies allow to improve, sometimes significantly, the performance of these solvers, both on decision and optimization problems.

The CDCL architecture [14] and the use of efficient data structures and heuristics [4, 16] are at the core of the practical efficiency of modern SAT solvers. Even though these solvers can deal with very large benchmarks, containing millions of variables and clauses, some relatively small problems (with only few variables and clauses) remain completely out of their reach. This is particularly true for problems that require the ability to "count", such as those known as pigeonhole-principle formulae, stating that n pigeons cannot fit into n 1 holes. For such problems, the resolution proof system used internally by SAT solvers is too weak: it can only prove unsatisfiability with an exponential number of derivation steps [7]. This has motivated the generalization of the CDCL architecture to handle pseudo-Boolean (PB) problems [18]. Doing so, one can take advantage of the strength of the cutting planes proof system [6], which p-simulates resolution: any resolution proof can be translated into a cutting planes proof of polynomial size w.r.t. the size of the original proof.

The goal of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is to learn a program that explains a set of examples. Until recently, most research on ILP targeted learning Prolog programs. The ILASP system instead learns Answer Set Programs (ASP). Learning such expressive programs widens the applicability of ILP considerably; for example, enabling preference learning, learning common-sense knowledge, including defaults and exceptions, and learning non-deterministic theories. Early versions of ILASP can be considered meta-level ILP approaches, which encode a learning task as a logic program and delegate the search to an ASP solver. More recently, ILASP has shifted towards a new method, inspired by conflict-driven SAT and ASP solvers. The fundamental idea of the approach, called Conflict-driven ILP (CDILP), is to iteratively interleave the search for a hypothesis with the generation of constraints which explain why the current hypothesis does not cover a particular example. These coverage constraints allow ILASP to rule out not just the current hypothesis, but an entire class of hypotheses that do not satisfy the coverage constraint. This paper formalises the CDILP approach and presents the ILASP3 and ILASP4 systems for CDILP, which are demonstrated to be more scalable than previous ILASP systems, particularly in the presence of noise.

Learning pseudo-Boolean (PB) constraints in PB solvers exploiting cutting planes based inference is not as well understood as clause learning in conflict-driven clause learning solvers. In this paper, we show that PB constraints derived using cutting planes may contain \emph{irrelevant literals}, i.e., literals whose assigned values (whatever they are) never change the truth value of the constraint. Such literals may lead to infer constraints that are weaker than they should be, impacting the size of the proof built by the solver, and thus also affecting its performance. This suggests that current implementations of PB solvers based on cutting planes should be reconsidered to prevent the generation of irrelevant literals. Indeed, detecting and removing irrelevant literals is too expensive in practice to be considered as an option (the associated problem is NP-hard.

We describe a SAT solver using both the GPU (CUDA) and the CPU with a new clause exchange strategy. The CPU runs a classic multithreaded CDCL SAT solver. EachCPU thread exports all the clauses it learns to the GPU. The GPU makes a heavy usage of bitwise operations. It notices when a clause would have been used by a CPU thread and notifies that thread, in which case it imports that clause. This relies on the GPU repeatedly testing millions of clauses against hundreds of assignments. All the clauses are tested independantly from each other (which allows the GPU massively parallel approach), but against all the assignments at once, using bitwise operations. This allows CPU threads to only import clauses which would have been useful for them. Our solver is based upon glucose-syrup. Experiments show that this leads to a strong performance improvement, with 22 more instances solved on the SAT 2020 competition than glucose-syrup.

Current pseudo-Boolean solvers implement different variants of the cutting planes proof system to infer new constraints during conflict analysis. One of these variants is generalized resolution, which allows to infer strong constraints, but suffers from the growth of coefficients it generates while combining pseudo-Boolean constraints. Another variant consists in using weakening and division, which is more efficient in practice but may infer weaker constraints. In both cases, weakening is mandatory to derive conflicting constraints. However, its impact on the performance of pseudo-Boolean solvers has not been assessed so far. In this paper, new application strategies for this rule are studied, aiming to infer strong constraints with small coefficients. We implemented them in Sat4j and observed that each of them improves the runtime of the solver. While none of them performs better than the others on all benchmarks, applying weakening on the conflict side has surprising good performance, whereas applying partial weakening and division on both the conflict and the reason sides provides the best results overall.

Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) can be used to succinctly encode problems from domains such as formal verification, planning, and synthesis. One of the main approaches to QBF solving is Quantified Conflict Driven Clause Learning (QCDCL). By default, QCDCL assigns variables in the order of their appearance in the quantifier prefix so as to account for dependencies among variables. Dependency schemes can be used to relax this restriction and exploit independence among variables in certain cases, but only at the cost of nontrivial interferences with the proof system underlying QCDCL. We introduce dependency learning, a new technique for exploiting variable independence within QCDCL that allows solvers to learn variable dependencies on the fly. The resulting version of QCDCL enjoys improved propagation and increased flexibility in choosing variables for branching while retaining ordinary (long-distance) Q-resolution as its underlying proof system. We show that dependency learning can achieve exponential speedups over ordinary QCDCL. Experiments on standard benchmark sets demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique.