Stefan Mengel

Hubie Chen, Gianluigi Greco, Stefan Mengel et al.

Counting the number of answers to conjunctive queries is a fundamental problem in databases that, under standard assumptions, does not have an efficient solution. The issue is inherently #P-hard, extending even to classes of acyclic instances. To address this, we pinpoint tractable classes by examining the structural properties of instances and introducing the novel concept of #-hypertree decomposition. We establish the feasibility of counting answers in polynomial time for classes of queries featuring bounded #-hypertree width. Additionally, employing novel techniques from the realm of fixed-parameter computational complexity, we prove that, for bounded arity queries, the bounded #-hypertree width property precisely delineates the frontier of tractability for the counting problem. This result closes an important gap in our understanding of the complexity of such a basic problem for conjunctive queries and, equivalently, for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Drawing upon #-hypertree decompositions, a ''hybrid'' decomposition method emerges. This approach leverages both the structural characteristics of the query and properties intrinsic to the input database, including keys or other (weaker) degree constraints that limit the permissible combinations of values. Intuitively, these features may introduce distinct structural properties that elude identification through the ''worst-possible database'' perspective inherent in purely structural methods.

Stefan Mengel

We study BDD-based bucket elimination, an approach to satisfiability testing using variable elimination which has seen several practical implementations in the past. We prove that it allows solving the standard pigeonhole principle formulas efficiently, when allowing different orders for variable elimination and BDD-representations, a variant of bucket elimination that was recently introduced. Furthermore, we show that this upper bound is somewhat brittle as for formulas which we get from the pigeonhole principle by restriction, i.e., fixing some of the variables, the same approach with the same variable orders has exponential runtime. We also show that the more common implementation of bucket elimination using the same order for variable elimination and the BDDs has exponential runtime for the pigeonhole principle when using either of the two orders from our upper bound, which suggests that the combination of both is the key to efficiency in the setting.

Stefan Mengel

It is shown that disjunction of two switch-lists can blow up the representation size exponentially. Since switch-lists can be negated without any increase in size, this shows that conjunction of switch-lists also leads to an exponential blow-up in general.

Frederic Koriche, Jean-Marie Lagniez, Stefan Mengel et al.

Interpretable Machine Learning faces a recurring challenge of explaining the predictions made by opaque classifiers such as ensemble models, kernel methods, or neural networks in terms that are understandable to humans. When the model is viewed as a black box, the objective is to identify a small set of features that jointly determine the black box response with minimal error. However, finding such model-agnostic explanations is computationally demanding, as the problem is intractable even for binary classifiers. In this paper, the task is framed as a Constraint Optimization Problem, where the constraint solver seeks an explanation of minimum error and bounded size for an input data instance and a set of samples generated by the black box. From a theoretical perspective, this constraint programming approach offers PAC-style guarantees for the output explanation. We evaluate the approach empirically on various datasets and show that it statistically outperforms the state-of-the-art heuristic Anchors method.

Danel Le Berre, Pierre Marquis, Stefan Mengel et al.

Learning pseudo-Boolean (PB) constraints in PB solvers exploiting cutting planes based inference is not as well understood as clause learning in conflict-driven clause learning solvers. In this paper, we show that PB constraints derived using cutting planes may contain \emph{irrelevant literals}, i.e., literals whose assigned values (whatever they are) never change the truth value of the constraint. Such literals may lead to infer constraints that are weaker than they should be, impacting the size of the proof built by the solver, and thus also affecting its performance. This suggests that current implementations of PB solvers based on cutting planes should be reconsidered to prevent the generation of irrelevant literals. Indeed, detecting and removing irrelevant literals is too expensive in practice to be considered as an option (the associated problem is NP-hard.

Alexis de Colnet, Stefan Mengel

Knowledge compilation studies the trade-off between succinctness and efficiency of different representation languages. For many languages, there are known strong lower bounds on the representation size, but recent work shows that, for some languages, one can bypass these bounds using approximate compilation. The idea is to compile an approximation of the knowledge for which the number of errors can be controlled. We focus on circuits in deterministic decomposable negation normal form (d-DNNF), a compilation language suitable in contexts such as probabilistic reasoning, as it supports efficient model counting and probabilistic inference. Moreover, there are known size lower bounds for d-DNNF which by relaxing to approximation one might be able to avoid. In this paper we formalize two notions of approximation: weak approximation which has been studied before in the decision diagram literature and strong approximation which has been used in recent algorithmic results. We then show lower bounds for approximation by d-DNNF, complementing the positive results from the literature.

Antoine Amarilli, Pierre Bourhis, Stefan Mengel et al.

We consider the information extraction framework known as document spanners, and study the problem of efficiently computing the results of the extraction from an input document, where the extraction task is described as a sequential variable-set automaton (VA). We pose this problem in the setting of enumeration algorithms, where we can first run a preprocessing phase and must then produce the results with a small delay between any two consecutive results. Our goal is to have an algorithm which is tractable in combined complexity, i.e., in the sizes of the input document and the VA; while ensuring the best possible data complexity bounds in the input document size, i.e., constant delay in the document size. Several recent works at PODS'18 proposed such algorithms but with linear delay in the document size or with an exponential dependency in size of the (generally nondeterministic) input VA. In particular, Florenzano et al. suggest that our desired runtime guarantees cannot be met for general sequential VAs. We refute this and show that, given a nondeterministic sequential VA and an input document, we can enumerate the mappings of the VA on the document with the following bounds: the preprocessing is linear in the document size and polynomial in the size of the VA, and the delay is independent of the document and polynomial in the size of the VA. The resulting algorithm thus achieves tractability in combined complexity and the best possible data complexity bounds. Moreover, it is rather easy to describe, in particular for the restricted case of so-called extended VAs.

Michael Lampis, Stefan Mengel, Valia Mitsou

We propose reductions to quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) as a new approach to showing fixed-parameter linear algorithms for problems parameterized by treewidth. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by giving new algorithms for several well-known problems from artificial intelligence that are in general complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. By reduction from QBF we show that all resulting algorithms are essentially optimal in their dependence on the treewidth. Most of the problems that we consider were already known to be fixed-parameter linear by using Courcelle's Theorem or dynamic programming, but we argue that our approach has clear advantages over these techniques: on the one hand, in contrast to Courcelle's Theorem, we get concrete and tight guarantees for the runtime dependence on the treewidth. On the other hand, we avoid tedious dynamic programming and, after showing some normalization results for CNF-formulas, our upper bounds often boil down to a few lines.

Stefan Mengel

We show unconditional parameterized lower bounds in the area of knowledge compilation, more specifically on the size of circuits in decomposable negation normal form (DNNF) that encode CNF-formulas restricted by several graph width measures. In particular, we show that - there are CNF formulas of size $n$ and modular incidence treewidth $k$ whose smallest DNNF-encoding has size $n^{Ω(k)}$, and - there are CNF formulas of size $n$ and incidence neighborhood diversity $k$ whose smallest DNNF-encoding has size $n^{Ω(\sqrt{k})}$. These results complement recent upper bounds for compiling CNF into DNNF and strengthen---quantitatively and qualitatively---known conditional low\-er bounds for cliquewidth. Moreover, they show that, unlike for many graph problems, the parameters considered here behave significantly differently from treewidth.

Johann Brault-Baron, Florent Capelli, Stefan Mengel

We extend the knowledge about so-called structural restrictions of $\mathrm{\#SAT}$ by giving a polynomial time algorithm for $β$-acyclic $\mathrm{\#SAT}$. In contrast to previous algorithms in the area, our algorithm does not proceed by dynamic programming but works along an elimination order, solving a weighted version of constraint satisfaction. Moreover, we give evidence that this deviation from more standard algorithm is not a coincidence, but that there is likely no dynamic programming algorithm of the usual style for $β$-acyclic $\mathrm{\#SAT}$.