Combining Clause Learning and Branch and Bound for MaxSAT (Extended Abstract)

Combining Clause Learning and Branch and Bound for MaxSAT (Extended Abstract)

Chu-Min Li, Zhenxing Xu, Jordi Coll, Felip ManyĆ , Djamal Habet, Kun He

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Sister Conferences Best Papers. Pages 5299-5303. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/739

Branch and Bound (BnB) has been successfully used to solve many combinatorial optimization problems. However, BnB MaxSAT solvers perform poorly when solving real-world and academic optimization problems. They are only competitive for random and some crafted instances. Thus, it is a prevailing opinion in the community that BnB is not really useful for practical MaxSAT solving. We refute this opinion by presenting a new BnB MaxSAT solver, called MaxCDCL, which combines clause learning and an efficient bounding procedure. MaxCDCL is among the top 5 out of a total of 15 exact solvers that participated in the 2020 MaxSAT Evaluation, solving several instances that other solvers cannot solve. Furthermore, MaxCDCL solves the highest number of instances from different MaxSAT Evaluations when combined with the best existing solvers.
Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence: General