SoLA: Solver-Layer Adaption of LLM for Better Logic Reasoning

Considering the challenges faced by large language models (LLMs) on logical reasoning, prior efforts have sought to transform problem-solving through tool learning. While progress has been made on small-scale problems, solving industrial cases remains difficult due to their large scale and intricate expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel solver-layer adaptation (SoLA) method, where we introduce a solver as a new layer of the LLM to differentially guide solutions towards satisfiability. In SoLA, LLM aims to comprehend the search space described in natural language and identify local solutions of the highest quality, while the solver layer focuses solely on constraints not satisfied by the initial solution. Leveraging MaxSAT as a bridge, we define forward and backward transfer gradients, enabling the final model to converge to a satisfied solution or prove unsatisfiability. The backdoor theory ensures that SoLA can obtain accurate solutions within polynomial loops. We evaluate the performance of SoLA on various datasets and empirically demonstrate its consistent outperformance against existing symbolic solvers (including Z3 and Kissat) and tool-learning methods in terms of efficiency in large-scale problem-solving.

BetterV: Controlled Verilog Generation with Discriminative Guidance

Due to the growing complexity of modern Integrated Circuits (ICs), there is a need for automated circuit design methods. Recent years have seen rising research in hardware design language generation to facilitate the design process. In this work, we propose a Verilog generation framework, BetterV, which fine-tunes the large language models (LLMs) on processed domain-specific datasets and incorporates generative discriminators for guidance on particular design demands. The Verilog modules are collected, filtered and processed from internet to form a clean and abundant dataset. Instruct-tuning methods are specially designed to fine-tuned the LLMs to understand the knowledge about Verilog. Furthermore, data are augmented to enrich the training set and also used to train a generative discriminator on particular downstream task, which leads a guidance for the LLMs to optimize the Verilog implementation. BetterV has the ability to generate syntactically and functionally correct Verilog, which can outperform GPT-4 on the VerilogEval-machine benchmark. With the help of task-specific generative discriminator, BetterV can achieve remarkable improvement on various electronic design automation (EDA) downstream tasks, including the netlist node reduction for synthesis and verification runtime reduction with Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solving.

Machine Learning Insides OptVerse AI Solver: Design Principles and Applications

In an era of digital ubiquity, efficient resource management and decision-making are paramount across numerous industries. To this end, we present a comprehensive study on the integration of machine learning (ML) techniques into Huawei Cloud's OptVerse AI Solver, which aims to mitigate the scarcity of real-world mathematical programming instances, and to surpass the capabilities of traditional optimization techniques. We showcase our methods for generating complex SAT and MILP instances utilizing generative models that mirror multifaceted structures of real-world problem. Furthermore, we introduce a training framework leveraging augmentation policies to maintain solvers' utility in dynamic environments. Besides the data generation and augmentation, our proposed approaches also include novel ML-driven policies for personalized solver strategies, with an emphasis on applications like graph convolutional networks for initial basis selection and reinforcement learning for advanced presolving and cut selection. Additionally, we detail the incorporation of state-of-the-art parameter tuning algorithms which markedly elevate solver performance. Compared with traditional solvers such as Cplex and SCIP, our ML-augmented OptVerse AI Solver demonstrates superior speed and precision across both established benchmarks and real-world scenarios, reinforcing the practical imperative and effectiveness of machine learning techniques in mathematical programming solvers.

DeepGate2: Functionality-Aware Circuit Representation Learning

Circuit representation learning aims to obtain neural representations of circuit elements and has emerged as a promising research direction that can be applied to various EDA and logic reasoning tasks. Existing solutions, such as DeepGate, have the potential to embed both circuit structural information and functional behavior. However, their capabilities are limited due to weak supervision or flawed model design, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce DeepGate2, a novel functionality-aware learning framework that significantly improves upon the original DeepGate solution in terms of both learning effectiveness and efficiency. Our approach involves using pairwise truth table differences between sampled logic gates as training supervision, along with a well-designed and scalable loss function that explicitly considers circuit functionality. Additionally, we consider inherent circuit characteristics and design an efficient one-round graph neural network (GNN), resulting in an order of magnitude faster learning speed than the original DeepGate solution. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in two practical downstream tasks: logic synthesis and Boolean satisfiability solving. The code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/DeepGate2

Conflict-driven Structural Learning Towards Higher Coverage Rate in ATPG

Due to the increasing challenges posed by the relentless rise in the design complexity of integrated circuits, Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) has emerged as a robust alternative to structural APTG techniques. However, the high cost of transforming a circuit testing problem to a Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) limits the application of SAT in industrial ATPG scenarios, resulting in a loss of test coverage. In Order to address this problem, this paper proposes a conflict-driven structural learning (CDSL) ATPG algorithm firstly, in which the conflict-driven heuristic methods in modern SAT solver are implemented on the logic cone of fault propagation and activation directly. The proposed CDSL algorithm is composed of three parts: (1) According to the implication graph, various conflict constraints have been learned to prune search space. (2) Conflict-driven implication and justification have been applied to increase decision accuracy and solving efficiency. (3) A conflict-based diagnosis method is further proposed in the case of low coverage debug, leading to making the aborted faults testable by relaxing or modifying some constraints on primary inputs. Extensive experimental results on industrial circuits demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed CDSL algorithm. It is shown that compared with the SAT-based ATPG, the proposed CDSL can on average decrease $25.6\%$ aborted faults with $94.51\%$ less run time. With a two-stage computational flow, it has shown that the proposed CDSL can lead to $46.37\%$ less aborted faults than a one-stage structural algorithm, further with the $3.19\%$ improvement on fault coverage. In addition, the conflict diagnosis can lead to $8.89\%$ less aborted faults on average, and $0.271\%$ improvement in fault coverage rate.

HardSATGEN: Understanding the Difficulty of Hard SAT Formula Generation and A Strong Structure-Hardness-Aware Baseline

Industrial SAT formula generation is a critical yet challenging task for heuristic development and the surging learning-based methods in practical SAT applications. Existing SAT generation approaches can hardly simultaneously capture the global structural properties and maintain plausible computational hardness, which can be hazardous for the various downstream engagements. To this end, we first present an in-depth analysis for the limitation of previous learning methods in reproducing the computational hardness of original instances, which may stem from the inherent homogeneity in their adopted split-merge procedure. On top of the observations that industrial formulae exhibit clear community structure and oversplit substructures lead to the difficulty in semantic formation of logical structures, we propose HardSATGEN, which introduces a fine-grained control mechanism to the neural split-merge paradigm for SAT formula generation to better recover the structural and computational properties of the industrial benchmarks. Experimental results including evaluations on private corporate data and hyperparameter tuning over solvers in practical use show the significant superiority of HardSATGEN being the only method to successfully augments formulae maintaining similar computational hardness and capturing the global structural properties simultaneously. Compared to the best previous methods to our best knowledge, the average performance gains achieve 38.5% in structural statistics, 88.4% in computational metrics, and over 140.7% in the effectiveness of guiding solver development tuned by our generated instances.

SATformer: Transformers for SAT Solving

In this paper, we propose SATformer, a novel Transformer-based solution for Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving. Different from existing learning-based SAT solvers that learn at the problem instance level, SATformer learns the minimum unsatisfiable cores (MUC) of unsatisfiable problem instances, which provide rich information for the causality of such problems. Specifically, we apply a graph neural network (GNN) to obtain the embeddings of the clauses in the conjunctive normal format (CNF). A hierarchical Transformer architecture is applied on the clause embeddings to capture the relationships among clauses, and the self-attention weight is learned to be high when those clauses forming UNSAT cores are attended together, and set to be low otherwise. By doing so, SATformer effectively learns the correlations among clauses for SAT prediction. Experimental results show that SATformer is more powerful than existing end-to-end learning-based SAT solvers.

Branch Ranking for Efficient Mixed-Integer Programming via Offline Ranking-based Policy Learning

Deriving a good variable selection strategy in branch-and-bound is essential for the efficiency of modern mixed-integer programming (MIP) solvers. With MIP branching data collected during the previous solution process, learning to branch methods have recently become superior over heuristics. As branch-and-bound is naturally a sequential decision making task, one should learn to optimize the utility of the whole MIP solving process instead of being myopic on each step. In this work, we formulate learning to branch as an offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem, and propose a long-sighted hybrid search scheme to construct the offline MIP dataset, which values the long-term utilities of branching decisions. During the policy training phase, we deploy a ranking-based reward assignment scheme to distinguish the promising samples from the long-term or short-term view, and train the branching model named Branch Ranking via offline policy learning. Experiments on synthetic MIP benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that Branch Rankink is more efficient and robust, and can better generalize to large scales of MIP instances compared to the widely used heuristics and state-of-the-art learning-based branching models.

A Survey for Solving Mixed Integer Programming via Machine Learning

This paper surveys the trend of leveraging machine learning to solve mixed integer programming (MIP) problems. Theoretically, MIP is an NP-hard problem, and most of the combinatorial optimization (CO) problems can be formulated as the MIP. Like other CO problems, the human-designed heuristic algorithms for MIP rely on good initial solutions and cost a lot of computational resources. Therefore, we consider applying machine learning methods to solve MIP, since ML-enhanced approaches can provide the solution based on the typical patterns from the historical data. In this paper, we first introduce the formulation and preliminaries of MIP and several traditional algorithms to solve MIP. Then, we advocate further promoting the different integration of machine learning and MIP and introducing related learning-based methods, which can be classified into exact algorithms and heuristic algorithms. Finally, we propose the outlook for learning-based MIP solvers, direction towards more combinatorial optimization problems beyond MIP, and also the mutual embrace of traditional solvers and machine learning components.

Machine Learning Methods in Solving the Boolean Satisfiability Problem

This paper reviews the recent literature on solving the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), an archetypal NP-complete problem, with the help of machine learning techniques. Despite the great success of modern SAT solvers to solve large industrial instances, the design of handcrafted heuristics is time-consuming and empirical. Under the circumstances, the flexible and expressive machine learning methods provide a proper alternative to solve this long-standing problem. We examine the evolving ML-SAT solvers from naive classifiers with handcrafted features to the emerging end-to-end SAT solvers such as NeuroSAT, as well as recent progress on combinations of existing CDCL and local search solvers with machine learning methods. Overall, solving SAT with machine learning is a promising yet challenging research topic. We conclude the limitations of current works and suggest possible future directions.