Paper accepted to SAT 2020

The work develops the concept of abstract cores in the context of maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) solving, through which the empirical performance state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers can be improved.

The paper Abstract Cores in Implicit Hitting Set MaxSat Solving authored by Jeremias Berg together with Fahiem Bacchus and Alex Poole (University of Toronto, Canada), has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2020).

The work proposes a technique called abstract cores that provides a compact representation for a potentially exponential number of regular unsatisfiable cores. The authors demonstrate how to incorporate abstract core reasoning into the so-called implicit hitting set (IHS) algorithm for maximum satisfiability (MaxSat) and report on an empirical evaluation demonstrating that including abstract cores into a state-of-the-art IHS solver improves its performance enough to surpass the best performing solvers of the most recent 2019 MaxSat Evaluation.