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On Dedicated CDCL Strategies for PB Solvers

2021/09/02 by Daniel Le Berre, Berre, Daniel Le, Romain Wallon +1
Chemistry · Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques #Synthetic Organic Chemistry Methods

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.01013

openalex publication_date 2021/09/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

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.

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