Lightweight Online Learning for Sets of Related Problems in Automated Reasoning

We present Self-Driven Strategy Learning (SDSL), a lightweight online learning methodology for automated reasoning tasks that involve solving a set of related problems. SDSL does not require offline training, but instead automatically constructs a dataset while solving earlier problems. It fits a machine learning model to this data which is then used to adjust the solving strategy for later problems. We formally define the approach as a set of abstract transition rules. We describe a concrete instance of the SDSL calculus which uses conditional sampling for generating data and random forests as the underlying machine learning model. We implement the approach on top of the KISSAT solver and show that the combination of KISSAT=SDSL certifies larger bounds and finds more counter-examples than other state-of-the-art bounded model checking approaches on benchmarks obtained from the latest Hardware Model Checking Competition.