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arxiv: 2410.18707 · v2 · submitted 2024-10-22 · 💻 cs.LO

Disjoint Projected Enumeration for SAT and SMT without Blocking Clauses

Pith reviewed 2026-05-23 19:20 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.LO
keywords AllSATAllSMTprojected enumerationchronological backtrackingblocking clausesimplicant shrinkingCDCLSMT solvers
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The pith

Disjoint projected AllSAT and AllSMT enumeration works without blocking clauses when CDCL is paired with chronological backtracking.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper introduces solvers called tabularAllSAT and tabularAllSMT that enumerate all satisfying assignments for SAT and SMT formulas while projecting onto a subset of important variables. Traditional approaches rely on blocking clauses to keep solutions disjoint, but these clauses lead to memory growth and slower propagation as the enumeration proceeds. The new method instead uses chronological backtracking together with conflict-driven clause learning to maintain disjointness by construction. It adds an aggressive implicant shrinking procedure that produces compact partial assignments and works with the chosen backtracking order. Experiments indicate the approach outperforms existing solvers, especially on projected instances and those that require theory reasoning.

Core claim

tabularAllSAT and tabularAllSMT integrate Conflict-Driven Clause Learning with chronological backtracking to perform projected AllSAT and AllSMT enumeration in a disjoint manner without blocking clauses; a novel aggressive implicant shrinking algorithm minimizes the size of the emitted partial assignments, and the framework is extended to distinguish important variables and to incorporate theory reasoning.

What carries the argument

Chronological backtracking combined with CDCL to enforce disjoint enumeration without blocking clauses, plus aggressive implicant shrinking to obtain compact partial assignments.

If this is right

  • Memory consumption stays bounded because no blocking clauses are added during long enumerations.
  • Unit propagation efficiency does not degrade over the course of the search.
  • Projected enumeration correctly handles the distinction between important and non-important variables.
  • SMT theory reasoning integrates directly into the enumeration loop without extra blocking overhead.
  • Fewer and smaller partial assignments reduce the total number of search steps.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same chronological-backtracking pattern may be worth testing on enumeration tasks outside SAT and SMT, such as in constraint programming.
  • The implicant-shrinking procedure could be ported to other solvers that already use chronological backtracking.
  • Probabilistic inference tools that rely on complete model enumeration might see runtime gains if they adopt the method.

Load-bearing premise

The benchmarks and instances used in the experiments are representative of the target applications and the observed advantages generalize beyond those specific cases.

What would settle it

A new collection of industrial verification or AI benchmarks on which the new solvers consume more memory or run slower than blocking-clause solvers would falsify the claimed superiority.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2410.18707 by Armin Biere, Giuseppe Spallitta, Roberto Sebastiani.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Scatter plot comparing CPU time and # of partial models with the two implicant [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p026_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Scatter plots comparing TabularAllSAT CPU times against other AllSAT solvers. The x and y axes are log-scaled. TabularAllSAT D4+ModelGraph BDD NBC MathSAT5 BC BC Partial rnd3sat (410) 410 410 409 396 229 194 210 CSB (1000) 1000 1000 1000 1000 997 865 636 BMS (500) 500 500 498 498 473 368 353 Total (1910) 1910 1910 1907 1894 1699 1427 1199 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Number of instances solved by each solver within a timeout (1200 seconds) for [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Scatter plots comparing TabularAllSAT against D4+ModelGraph on All￾SAT problems in [22]. The x and y axes are log-scaled. TabularAllSAT D4+Modelgraph compilation(197) 137 165 competition(246) 99 113 Total(443) 236 289 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p028_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Scatter plot comparing CPU time and number of partial assign [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p030_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Scatter plot comparing CPU time of TabularAllSAT against Dualiza, MathSAT5, and D4+ModelGraph on projected AllSAT problems. The x and y axes are log-scaled. TabularAllSAT D4+ModelGraph Dualiza MathSAT5 iscas (100) 100 100 76 78 b25 r0 d6 (250) 250 250 250 174 Total (350) 350 350 326 252 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p031_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Table reporting the number of instances solved by each solver within the timeout [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p031_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Scatter plot comparing CPU time and number of partial assignments of [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p032_9.png] view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Scatter plot comparing CPU time for total enumeration (a), CPU time for [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p034_10.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Table reporting the number of instances solved by each solver within the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p034_11.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

All-Solution Satisfiability (AllSAT) and its extension, All-Solution Satisfiability Modulo Theories (AllSMT), have become more relevant in recent years, mainly in formal verification and artificial intelligence applications. The goal of these problems is the enumeration of all satisfying assignments of a formula (for SAT and SMT problems, respectively), making them useful for test generation, model checking, and probabilistic inference. Nevertheless, traditional AllSAT algorithms face significant computational challenges due to the exponential growth of the search space and inefficiencies caused by blocking clauses, which cause memory blowups and degrade unit propagation performances in the long term. This paper presents two novel solvers: tabularAllSAT, a projected AllSAT solver, and tabularAllSMT, a projected AllSMT solver. Both solvers combine Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) with chronological backtracking to improve efficiency while ensuring disjoint enumeration. To retrieve compact partial assignments we propose a novel aggressive implicant shrinking algorithm, compatible with chronological backtracking, to minimize the number of partial assignments, reducing overall search complexity. Furthermore, we extend the solver framework to handle projected enumeration and SMT formulas effectively and efficiently, adapting the baseline framework to integrate theory reasoning and the distinction between important and non-important variables. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our approach compared to state-of-the-art solvers, particularly in scenarios requiring projection and SMT-based reasoning.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper introduces tabularAllSAT and tabularAllSMT, two solvers for projected AllSAT and AllSMT that achieve disjoint enumeration without blocking clauses. They combine CDCL with chronological backtracking and introduce an aggressive implicant shrinking procedure to produce compact partial assignments. The framework is extended to distinguish important/non-important variables and to integrate theory reasoning for SMT; an experimental section claims superiority over existing solvers on projection-heavy and SMT instances.

Significance. If the reported performance gains hold, the approach would be a practical advance for AllSAT/AllSMT applications in verification and probabilistic inference by eliminating the memory and propagation overhead of blocking clauses while preserving disjointness. The combination of chronological backtracking with shrinking is a concrete algorithmic contribution that could be adopted more broadly.

major comments (2)
  1. [§5] §5 (experimental tables): the superiority claims rest on benchmark runs, yet the text does not report variance across random seeds, statistical significance tests, or the precise distribution of projection-variable cardinalities; without these, it is impossible to judge whether the observed speed-ups are robust or instance-specific.
  2. [§3.2] §3.2 (implicant shrinking): the description of the shrinking procedure is compatible with chronological backtracking, but the manuscript does not supply a short argument or invariant showing that the produced implicants remain disjoint across the entire search tree; this invariant is load-bearing for the central “disjoint without blocking clauses” claim.
minor comments (2)
  1. [§4] Notation for “important” versus “non-important” variables is introduced in §4 but used inconsistently in the pseudocode of Algorithm 2; a single clarifying sentence or footnote would suffice.
  2. [§5] Several figure captions in §5 omit the timeout value and memory limit used for the competing solvers; these parameters should be stated explicitly.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive feedback and the recommendation for major revision. Below we respond point-by-point to the major comments, indicating the revisions we will make to address the concerns.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [§5] §5 (experimental tables): the superiority claims rest on benchmark runs, yet the text does not report variance across random seeds, statistical significance tests, or the precise distribution of projection-variable cardinalities; without these, it is impossible to judge whether the observed speed-ups are robust or instance-specific.

    Authors: We agree that additional statistical details would strengthen the presentation. The core enumeration procedures are deterministic; any variability arises only from minor heuristic choices in variable ordering. In the revised §5 we will (i) report the distribution of projection-variable cardinalities over the benchmark sets and (ii) add a short paragraph noting that re-runs with varied random seeds produced negligible performance differences, together with standard deviations for any averaged timings. These additions can be made without new experimental campaigns. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [§3.2] §3.2 (implicant shrinking): the description of the shrinking procedure is compatible with chronological backtracking, but the manuscript does not supply a short argument or invariant showing that the produced implicants remain disjoint across the entire search tree; this invariant is load-bearing for the central “disjoint without blocking clauses” claim.

    Authors: We thank the referee for highlighting this omission. Chronological backtracking partitions the search space into disjoint subtrees at each decision point; the shrinking routine only drops literals that are implied by the current prefix and the learned clauses, preserving the coverage of each subtree. We will insert a concise invariant argument (one paragraph plus a short proof sketch) immediately after the description of the shrinking procedure in §3.2. This will be included in the revised manuscript. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity

full rationale

The paper presents new algorithmic solvers (tabularAllSAT, tabularAllSMT) that combine CDCL with chronological backtracking and introduce an aggressive implicant shrinking procedure for projected enumeration. These techniques are described via pseudocode and motivated by concrete implementation details rather than any self-referential definitions or fitted inputs. Central claims of superiority rest on external benchmark comparisons, not on equations or uniqueness theorems that reduce to the authors' prior work by construction. No self-citation is load-bearing for the core results, and the derivation chain consists of standard algorithmic extensions that remain independently verifiable through the supplied implementation and experiments.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 2 axioms · 0 invented entities

The approach rests on standard assumptions from CDCL SAT solving and the feasibility of combining chronological backtracking with theory reasoning; no free parameters or invented entities are introduced in the abstract.

axioms (2)
  • domain assumption CDCL can be combined with chronological backtracking to produce disjoint enumerations without blocking clauses
    Core design choice stated in the abstract for both solvers.
  • domain assumption Aggressive implicant shrinking is compatible with chronological backtracking and reduces search complexity
    Novel component claimed to minimize partial assignments.

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Reference graph

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