Bernhard Bliem

D-flat: Declarative problem solving using tree decompositions and answer-set programming

In this work, we propose Answer-Set Programming (ASP) as a tool for rapid prototyping of dynamic programming algorithms based on tree decompositions. In fact, many such algorithms have been designed, but only a few of them found their way into implementation. The main obstacle is the lack of easy-to-use systems which (i) take care of building a tree decomposition and (ii) provide an interface for declarative specifications of dynamic programming algorithms. In this paper, we present D-FLAT, a novel tool that relieves the user of having to handle all the technical details concerned with parsing, tree decomposition, the handling of data structures, etc. Instead, it is only the dynamic programming algorithm itself which has to be specified in the ASP language. D-FLAT employs an ASP solver in order to compute the local solutions in the dynamic programming algorithm. In the paper, we give a few examples illustrating the use of D-FLAT and describe the main features of the system. Moreover, we report experiments which show that ASP-based D-FLAT encodings for some problems outperform monolithic ASP encodings on instances of small treewidth.

The D-FLAT System for Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions

Complex reasoning problems over large amounts of data pose a great challenge for computer science. To overcome the obstacle of high computational complexity, exploiting structure by means of tree decompositions has proved to be effective in many cases. However, the implementation of suitable efficient algorithms is often tedious. D-FLAT is a software system that combines the logic programming language Answer Set Programming with problem solving on tree decompositions and can serve as a rapid prototyping tool for such algorithms. Since we initially proposed D-FLAT, we have made major changes to the system, improving its range of applicability and its usability. In this paper, we present the system resulting from these efforts.

D-FLAT^2: Subset Minimization in Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions Made Easy

Many problems from the area of AI have been shown tractable for bounded treewidth. In order to put such results into practice, quite involved dynamic programming (DP) algorithms on tree decompositions have to be designed and implemented. These algorithms typically show recurring patterns that call for tasks like subset-minimization. In this paper we present D-FLATˆ2, a system that allows one to obtain DP algorithms (specified in ASP) from simpler principles, where the DP formalization of subset-minimization is performed automatically. We illustrate the method at work by providing several DP algorithms – given in form of ASP programs – that are more space-efficient than existing solutions, while featuring improved readability, reuse and therefore maintainability of ASP code. Experiments show that our approach also yields a significant improvement in runtime performance.

Declarative Dynamic Programming as an Alternative Realization of Courcelle’s Theorem

Many computationally hard problems become tractable if the graph structure underlying the problem instance exhibits small treewidth. A recent approach to put this idea into practice is based on a declarative interface to specify dynamic programming over tree decompositions, delegating the computation to dedicated solvers. In this paper, we prove that this method can be applied to any problem whose fixed-parameter tractability follows from Courcelle’s Theorem.

The Impact of Treewidth on ASP Grounding and Solving

In this paper, we aim to study how the performance of modern answer set programming (ASP) solvers is influenced by the treewidth of the input program and to investigate the consequences of this relationship. We first perform an experimental evaluation that shows that the solving performance is heavily influenced by the treewidth, given ground input programs that are otherwise uniform, both in size and construction. This observation leads to an important question for ASP, namely, how to design encodings such that the treewidth of the resulting ground program remains small. To this end, we define the class of connection-guarded programs, which guarantees that the treewidth of the program after grounding only depends on the treewidth (and the degree) of the input instance. In order to obtain this result, we formalize the grounding process using MSO transductions.

Treewidth in Non-Ground Answer Set Solving and Alliance Problems in Graphs.

To solve hard problems efficiently via answer set programming (ASP), a promising approach is to take advantage of the fact that real-world instances of many hard problems exhibit small treewidth. Algorithms that exploit this have already been proposed -- however, they suffer from an enormous overhead. In the thesis, we present improvements in the algorithmic methodology for leveraging bounded treewidth that are especially targeted toward problems involving subset minimization. This can be useful for many problems at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy like solving disjunctive ground ASP. Moreover, we define classes of non-ground ASP programs such that grounding such a program together with input facts does not lead to an excessive increase in treewidth of the resulting ground program when compared to the treewidth of the input. This allows ASP users to take advantage of the fact that state-of-the-art ASP solvers perform better on ground programs of small treewidth. Finally, we resolve several open questions on the complexity of alliance problems in graphs. In particular, we settle the long-standing open questions of the complexity of the Secure Set problem and whether the Defensive Alliance problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by treewidth.

Equivalence between answer-set programs under (partially) fixed input

Answer Set Programming has become an increasingly popular formalism for declarative problem solving. Among the huge body of theoretical results, investigations of different equivalence notions between logic programs play a fundamental role for understanding modularity and optimization. While strong equivalence between two programs holds if they can be faithfully replaced by each other in any context (facts and rules), uniform equivalence amounts to equivalent behavior of programs under any set of facts. Both notions (as well as several variants thereof) have been extensively studied. However, the somewhat reverse notion of equivalence which holds if two programs are equivalent under the addition of any set of proper rules (i.e., all rules except facts) has not been investigated yet. In this paper, we close this gap and give a thorough study of this notion, which we call rule equivalence , and its parameterized version where we allow facts over a given restricted alphabet to appear in the context. This notion of equivalence is thus a relationship between two programs whose input is (partially) fixed but where additional proper rules might still be added. Such a notion might be helpful in debugging of programs. We give full characterization results and a complexity analysis for the propositional case of rule equivalence and its relativized versions. Moreover, we address the problem of program simplification under rule equivalence. Finally, we show that rule equivalence is decidable in the non-ground case.

Complexity of Secure Sets

A secure set S in a graph is defined as a set of vertices such that for any

Computing secure sets in graphs using answer set programming

X\subseteq S