scholarly journals Searching for the M Best Solutions in Graphical Models

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 889-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Flerova ◽  
Radu Marinescu ◽  
Rina Dechter

The paper focuses on finding the m best solutions to combinatorial optimization problems using best-first or depth-first branch and bound search. Specifically, we present a new algorithm m-A*, extending the well-known A* to the m-best task, and for the first time prove that all its desirable properties, including soundness, completeness and optimal efficiency, are maintained. Since best-first algorithms require extensive memory, we also extend the memory-efficient depth-first branch and bound to the m-best task. We adapt both algorithms to optimization tasks over graphical models (e.g., Weighted CSP and MPE in Bayesian networks), provide complexity analysis and an empirical evaluation. Our experiments confirm theory that the best-first approach is largely superior when memory is available, but depth-first branch and bound is more robust. We also show that our algorithms are competitive with related schemes recently developed for the m-best task.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Chu-Min Li ◽  
Zhenxing Xu ◽  
Jordi Coll ◽  
Felip Manyà ◽  
Djamal Habet ◽  
...  

The Maximum Satisfiability Problem, or MaxSAT, offers a suitable problem solving formalism for combinatorial optimization problems. Nevertheless, MaxSAT solvers implementing the Branch-and-Bound (BnB) scheme have not succeeded in solving challenging real-world optimization problems. It is widely believed that BnB MaxSAT solvers are only superior on random and some specific crafted instances. At the same time, SAT-based MaxSAT solvers perform particularly well on real-world instances. To overcome this shortcoming of BnB MaxSAT solvers, this paper proposes a new BnB MaxSAT solver called MaxCDCL. The main feature of MaxCDCL is the combination of clause learning of soft conflicts and an efficient bounding procedure. Moreover, the paper reports on an experimental investigation showing that MaxCDCL is competitive when compared with the best performing solvers of the 2020 MaxSAT Evaluation. MaxCDCL performs very well on real-world instances, and solves a number of instances that other solvers cannot solve. Furthermore, MaxCDCL, when combined with the best performing MaxSAT solvers, solves the highest number of instances of a collection from all the MaxSAT evaluations held so far.


2014 ◽  
Vol 591 ◽  
pp. 172-175
Author(s):  
M. Chandrasekaran ◽  
P. Sriramya ◽  
B. Parvathavarthini ◽  
M. Saravanamanikandan

In modern years, there has been growing importance in the design, analysis and to resolve extremely complex problems. Because of the complexity of problem variants and the difficult nature of the problems they deal with, it is arguably impracticable in the majority time to build appropriate guarantees about the number of fitness evaluations needed for an algorithm to and an optimal solution. In such situations, heuristic algorithms can solve approximate solutions; however suitable time and space complication take part an important role. In present, all recognized algorithms for NP-complete problems are requiring time that's exponential within the problem size. The acknowledged NP-hardness results imply that for several combinatorial optimization problems there are no efficient algorithms that realize a best resolution, or maybe a close to best resolution, on each instance. The study Computational Complexity Analysis of Selective Breeding algorithm involves both an algorithmic issue and a theoretical challenge and the excellence of a heuristic.


Author(s):  
Chu Min Li ◽  
Felip Manyà

MaxSAT solving is becoming a competitive generic approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems, partly due to the development of new solving techniques that have been recently incorporated into modern MaxSAT solvers, and to the challenge problems posed at the MaxSAT Evaluations. In this chapter we present the most relevant results on both approximate and exact MaxSAT solving, and survey in more detail the techniques that have proven to be useful in branch and bound MaxSAT and Weighted MaxSAT solvers. Among such techniques, we pay special attention to the definition of good quality lower bounds, powerful inference rules, clever variable selection heuristics and suitable data structures. Moreover, we discuss the advantages of dealing with hard and soft constraints in the Partial MaxSAT formalims, and present a summary of the MaxSAT Evaluations that have been organized so far as affiliated events of the International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing.


Author(s):  
Alexander B. Belyi ◽  
Stanislav L. Sobolevsky ◽  
Alexander N. Kurbatski ◽  
Carlo Ratti

In this work, a problem of partitioning a complete weighted graph into cliques in such a way that sum of edge weights between vertices belonging to the same clique is maximal is considered. This problem is known as a clique partitioning problem. It arises in many applications and is a varian of classical clustering problem. However, since the problem, as well as many other combinatorial optimization problems, is NP-hard, finding its exact solution often appears hard. In this work, a new method for constructing upper bounds of partition quality function values is proposed, and it is shown how to use these upper bounds in branch and bound technique for finding an exact solution. Proposed method is based on the usage of triangles constraining maximal possible quality of partition. Novelty of the method lies in possibility of using triangles overlapping by edges, which allows to find much tighter bounds than when using only non-overlapping subgraphs. Apart from constructing initial estimate, a method of its recalculation, when fixing edges on each step of branch and bound method, is described. Test results of proposed algorithm on generated sets of random graphs are provided. It is shown, that version that uses new bounds works several times faster than previously known methods.


Author(s):  
Xavier Gillard ◽  
Pierre Schaus ◽  
Vianney Coppé

This paper presents ddo, a generic and efficient library to solve constraint optimization problems with decision diagrams. To that end, our framework implements the branch-and-bound approach which has recently been introduced by Bergman et al., (2016) to solve dynamic programs to optimality. Our library allowed us to successfully reproduce the results of Bergman et al. for MISP, MCP and MAX2SAT while using a single generic library. As an additional benefit, our ddo library is able to exploit parallel computing for its purpose without imposing any constraint on the user (apart from memory safety). Ddo is released as an open source rust library (crate) alongside with its companion example programs to solve the aforementioned problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public implementation of a generic library to solve combinatorial optimization problems with branch-and-bound MDD.


Author(s):  
Jeremias Berg ◽  
Fahiem Bacchus ◽  
Alex Poole

Maximum satisfiability (MaxSat) solving is an active area of research motivated by numerous successful applications to solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. One of the most successful approaches for solving MaxSat instances from real world domains are the so called implicit hitting set (IHS) solvers. IHS solvers decouple MaxSat solving into separate core-extraction (i.e. reasoning) and optimization steps which are tackled by a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and an integer linear programming (IP) solver, respectively. While the approach shows state-of-the-art performance on many industrial instances, it is known that there exists instances on which IHS solvers need to extract an exponential number of cores before terminating. Motivated by the simplest of these problematic instances, we propose abstract cores, a compact representation for a potentially exponential number of regular cores. We demonstrate how to incorporate abstract core reasoning into the IHS algorithm 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 2019 MaxSat Evaluation.


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