Clause Redundancy and Preprocessing in Maximum Satisfiability

Abstract

The study of clause redundancy in Boolean satisfiability (SAT) has proven significant in various terms, from fundamental insights into preprocessing and inprocessing to the development of practical proof checkers and new types of strong proof systems. We study liftings of the recently-proposed notion of propagation redundancy-based on a semantic implication relationship between formulas-in the context of maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT), where of interest are reasoning techniques that preserve optimal cost (in contrast to preserving satisfiability in the realm of SAT). We establish that the strongest MaxSAT-lifting of propagation redundancy allows for changing in a controlled way the set of minimal correction sets in MaxSAT. This ability is key in succinctly expressing MaxSAT reasoning techniques and allows for obtaining correctness proofs in a uniform way for MaxSAT reasoning techniques very generally. Bridging theory to practice, we also provide a new MaxSAT preprocessor incorporating such extended techniques, and show through experiments its wide applicability in improving the performance of modern MaxSAT solvers.Peer reviewe