Ludovic Le Frioux

A machine learning based splitting heuristic for divide-and-conquer solvers

By Saeed Nejati, Ludovic Le Frioux, Vijay Ganesh

2020-12-31

In Proceedings of the 26 th international conference on principles and practice of constraint programming (CP’20)

Abstract

In this paper, we present a machine learning based splitting heuristic for divide-and-conquer parallel Boolean SAT solvers. Splitting heuristics, whether they are look-ahead or look-back, are designed using proxy metrics, which when optimized, approximate the true metric of minimizing solver runtime on sub-formulas resulting from a split. The rationale for such metrics is that they have been empirically shown to be excellent proxies for runtime of solvers, in addition to being cheap to compute in an online fashion. However, the design of traditional splitting methods are often ad-hoc and do not leverage the copious amounts of data that solvers generate. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose a machine learning based splitting heuristic that leverages the features of input formulas and data generated during the run of a divide-and-conquer (DC) parallel solver. More precisely, we reformulate the splitting problem as a ranking problem and develop two machine learning models for pairwise ranking and computing the minimum ranked variable. Our model can compare variables according to their splitting quality, which is based on a set of features extracted from structural properties of the input formula, as well as dynamic probing statistics, collected during the solver’s run. We derive the true labels through offline collection of runtimes of a parallel DC solver on sample formulas and variables within them. At each splitting point, we generate a predicted ranking (pairwise or minimum rank) of candidate variables and split the formula on the top variable. We implemented our heuristic in the Painless parallel SAT framework and evaluated our solver on a set of cryptographic instances encoding the SHA-1 preimage as well as SAT competition 2018 and 2019 benchmarks. We solve significantly more instances compared to the baseline Painless solver and outperform top divide-and-conquer solvers from recent SAT competitions, such as Treengeling. Furthermore, we are much faster than these top solvers on cryptographic benchmarks.

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On the usefulness of clause strengthening in parallel SAT solving

By Vincent Vallade, Ludovic Le Frioux, Souheib Baarir, Julien Sopena, Fabrice Kordon

2020-08-01

In Proceedings of the 12th NASA formal methods symposium (NFM’20)

Abstract

In the context of parallel SATisfiability solving, this paper presents an implementation and evaluation of a clause strengthening algorithm. The developed component can be easily combined with (virtually) any CDCL-like SAT solver. Our implementation is integrated as a part of Painless, a generic and modular framework for building parallel SAT solvers.

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Community and LBD-based clause sharing policy for parallel SAT solving

By Vincent Vallade, Ludovic Le Frioux, Souheib Baarir, Julien Sopena, Vijay Ganesh, Fabrice Kordon

2020-06-01

In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on theory and applications of satisfiability testing (SAT’20)

Abstract

Modern parallel SAT solvers rely heavily on effective clause sharing policies for their performance. The core problem being addressed by these policies can be succinctly stated as “the problem of identifying high-quality learnt clauses” that when shared between the worker nodes of parallel solvers results in improved performance than otherwise. The term “high-quality clauses” is often defined in terms of metrics that solver designers have identified over years of empirical study. Some of the more well-known metrics to identify high-quality clauses for sharing include clause length, literal block distance (LBD), and clause usage in propagation. In this paper, we propose a new metric aimed at identifying high-quality learnt clauses and a concomitant clause-sharing policy based on a combination of LBD and community structure of Boolean formulas. The concept of community structure has been proposed as a possible explanation for the extraordinary performance of SAT solvers in industrial instances. Hence, it is a natural candidate as a basis for a metric to identify high-quality clauses. To be more precise, our metric identifies clauses that have low LBD and low community number as ones that are high-quality for applications such as verification and testing. The community number of a clause C measures the number of different communities of a formula that the variables in C span. We perform extensive empirical analysis of our metric and clause-sharing policy, and show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on the benchmark from the parallel track of the last four SAT competitions.

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Towards more efficient parallel SAT solving

By Ludovic Le Frioux

2019-07-03

In

Abstract

Boolean SATisfiability has been used successfully in many applicative contexts. This is due to the capability of modern SAT solvers to solve complex problems involving millions of variables. Most SAT solvers have long been sequential and based on the CDCL algorithm. The emergence of many-core machines opens new possibilities in this domain. There are numerous parallel SAT solvers that differ by their strategies, programming languages, etc. Hence, comparing the efficiency of the theoretical approaches in a fair way is a challenging task. Moreover, the introduction of a new approach needs a deep understanding of the existing solvers’ implementations. We present Painless: a framework to build parallel SAT solvers for many-core environments. Thanks to its genericness and modularity, it provides the implementation of basics for parallel SAT solving. It also enables users to easily create their parallel solvers based on new strategies. Painless allowed to build and test existing strategies by using different chunk of solutions present in the literature. We were able to easily mimic the behaviour of three state-of-the-art solvers by factorising many parts of their implementations. The efficiency of Painless was highlighted as these implementations are at least efficient as the original ones. Moreover, one of our solvers won the SAT Competition’18. Going further, Painless enabled to conduct fair experiments in the context of divide-and-conquer solvers, and allowed us to highlight original compositions of strategies performing better than already known ones. Also, we were able to create and test new original strategies exploiting the modular structure of SAT instances.

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Modular and efficient divide-and-conquer SAT solver on top of the Painless framework

By Ludovic Le Frioux, Souheib Baarir, Julien Sopena, Fabrice Kordon

2019-02-13

In Proceedings of the 25th international conference on tools and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems (TACAS’19)

Abstract

Over the last decade, parallel SATisfiability solving has been widely studied from both theoretical and practical aspects. There are two main approaches. First, divide-and-conquer (D&C) splits the search space, each solver being in charge of a particular subspace. The second one, portfolio launches multiple solvers in parallel, and the first to find a solution ends the computation. However although D&C based approaches seem to be the natural way to work in parallel, portfolio ones experimentally provide better performances. An explanation resides on the difficulties to use the native formulation of the SAT problem (i.e., the CNF form) to compute an a priori good search space partitioning (i.e., all parallel solvers process their subspaces in comparable computational time). To avoid this, dynamic load balancing of the search subspaces is implemented. Unfortunately, this is difficult to compare load balancing strategies since state-of-the-art SAT solvers appropriately dealing with these aspects are hardly adaptable to various strategies than the ones they have been designed for. This paper aims at providing a way to overcome this problem by proposing an implementation and evaluation of different types of divide-and- conquer inspired from the literature. These are relying on the Painless framework, which provides concurrent facilities to elaborate such parallel SAT solvers. Comparison of the various strategies are then discussed.

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PaInleSS: A framework for parallel SAT solving

By Ludovic Le Frioux, Souheib Baarir, Julien Sopena, Fabrice Kordon

2017-06-30

In Proceedings of the 20th international conference on theory and applications of satisfiability testing (SAT’17)

Abstract

Over the last decade, parallel SAT solving has been widely studied from both theoretical and practical aspects. There are now numerous solvers that dier by parallelization strategies, programming languages, concurrent programming, involved libraries, etc. Hence, comparing the eciency of the theoretical approaches is a challenging task. Moreover, the introduction of a new approach needs either a deep understanding of the existing solvers, or to start from scratch the implementation of a new tool. We present PaInleSS: a framework to build parallel SAT solvers for many-core environments. Thanks to its genericity and modularity, it provides the implementation of basics for parallel SAT solving like clause exchanges, Portfolio and Divide-and-Conquer strategies. It also enables users to easily create their own parallel solvers based on new strategies. Our experiments show that our framework compares well with some of the best state-of-the-art solvers.

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