Learning Variable Activity Initialisation for Lazy Clause Generation Solvers

Contemporary research explores the possibilities of integrating machine learning (ML) approaches with traditional combinatorial optimisation solvers. Since optimisation hybrid solvers, which combine propositional satisfiability (SAT) and constraint programming (CP), dominate recent benchmarks, it is surprising that the literature has paid limited attention to machine learning approaches for hybrid CP–SAT solvers. We identify the technique of minimal unsatisfiable subsets as promising to improve the performance of the hybrid CP–SAT lazy clause generation solver Chuffed. We leverage a graph convolutional network (GCN) model, trained on an adapted version of the MiniZinc benchmark suite. The GCN predicts which variables belong to an unsatisfiable subset on CP instances; these predictions are used to initialise the activity score of Chuffed’s Variable-State Independent Decaying Sum (VSIDS) heuristic. We benchmark the ML-aided Chuffed on the MiniZinc benchmark suite and find a robust 2.5% gain over baseline Chuffed on MRCPSP instances. This paper thus presents the first, to our knowledge, successful application of machine learning to improve hybrid CP–SAT solvers, a step towards improved automatic solving of CP models.