Streamliners for Answer Set Programming
For ASP practitioners, this provides a method to automatically generate effective streamliners using LLMs, achieving significant speedups on benchmark problems.
The paper adapts the StreamLLM approach to Answer Set Programming, using LLMs to generate streamliner constraints that reduce search space. On three ASP benchmarks, the virtual best encoding achieves speedups of up to 4-5x over the original encoding.
Streamliner constraints reduce the search space of combinatorial problems by ruling out portions of the solution space. We adapt the StreamLLM approach, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate streamliners for Constraint Programming, to Answer Set Programming (ASP). Given an ASP encoding and a few small training instances, we prompt multiple LLMs to propose candidate constraints. Candidates that cause syntax errors, render satisfiable instances unsatisfiable, or degrade performance on all training instances are discarded. The surviving streamliners are evaluated together with the original encoding, and we report results for a virtual best encoding (VBE) that, for each instance, selects the fastest among the original encoding and its streamlined variants. On three ASP Competition benchmarks (Partner Units Problem, Sokoban, Towers of Hanoi), the VBE achieves speedups of up to 4--5x over the original encoding. Different LLMs produce semantically diverse constraints, not mere syntactic variations, indicating that the approach captures genuine problem structure.