Skolem functions for factored formulas
Ajith K. John, Shetal Shah, Supratik Chakraborty, Ashutosh Trivedi, S. Akshay · 2015
Given a propositional formula F(x, y), a Skolem function for x is a function ψ (y), such that substituting ψ (y) for x in F gives a formula semantically equivalent to ∃x F. Automatically generating Skolem functions is of significant interest in several applications including certified QBF solving, finding strategies of players in games, synthesising circuits and bitvector programs from specifications, disjunctive decomposition of sequential circuits etc. In many such applications, F is given as a conjunction of factors, each of which depends on a small subset of variables. Existing algorithms for Skolem function generation ignore any such factored form and treat F as a monolithic function. This presents scalability hurdles in medium to large problem instances. In this paper, we argue that exploiting the factored form of F can give significant performance improvements in practice when computing Skolem functions. We present a new CEGAR style algorithm for generating Skolem functions from factored propositional formulas. In contrast to earlier work, our algorithm neither requires a proof of QBF satisfiability nor uses composition of monolithic conjunctions of factors. We show experimentally that our algorithm generates smaller Skolem functions and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several large benchmarks.