QMaxSATpb: A Certified MaxSAT Solver

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Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2022)

Abstract

While certification has been successful in the context of satisfiablity solving, with most state-of-the-art solvers now able to provide proofs of unsatisfiability, in maximum satisfiability, such techniques are not yet widespread. In this paper, we present QMaxSATpb, an extension of QMaxSAT that can produce proofs of optimality in the VeriPB proof format, which itself builds on the well-known cutting planes proof system. Our experiments demonstrate that proof logging is possible without much overhead.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Since QMaxSATpb is based on QMaxSAT version 0.1 [31], which does not support weights, we do not discuss weighted (partial) MaxSAT here. Later versions of QMaxSAT do support weights, using other encodings of PB constraints in CNF.

  2. 2.

    Here, we use the fact that we can assume that \(S=\{\overline{x_1},\dots ,\overline{x_n} \}\), but our proof logging and verification also work with an arbitrary set of soft clauses.

  3. 3.

    There, this rule was called substitution redundancy.

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Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Jeremias Berg, Stephan Gocht, Ciaran McCreesh, and Jakob Nordström for fruitful discussions on proof logging and feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. This work was partially supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen (FWO) (project G070521N); computational resources and services were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by FWO and the Flemish Government.

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Vandesande, D., De Wulf, W., Bogaerts, B. (2022). QMaxSATpb: A Certified MaxSAT Solver. In: Gottlob, G., Inclezan, D., Maratea, M. (eds) Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. LPNMR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15707-3_33

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