Exponential Recency Weighted Average Branching Heuristic for SAT Solvers

Modern conflict-driven clause-learning SAT solvers routinely solve large real-world instances with millions of clauses and variables in them. Their success crucially depends on effective branching heuristics. In this paper, we propose a new branching heuristic inspired by the exponential recency weighted average algorithm used to solve the bandit problem. The branching heuristic, we call CHB, learns online which variables to branch on by leveraging the feedback received from conflict analysis. We evaluated CHB on 1200 instances from the SAT Competition 2013 and 2014 instances, and showed that CHB solves significantly more instances than VSIDS, currently the most effective branching heuristic in widespread use. More precisely, we implemented CHB as part of the MiniSat and Glucose solvers, and performed an apple-to-apple comparison with their VSIDS-based variants. CHB-based MiniSat (resp. CHB-based Glucose) solved approximately 16.1% (resp. 5.6%) more instances than their VSIDS-based variants. Additionally, CHB-based solvers are much more efficient at constructing first preimage attacks on step-reduced SHA-1 and MD5 cryptographic hash functions, than their VSIDS-based counterparts. To the best of our knowledge, CHB is the first branching heuristic to solve significantly more instances than VSIDS on a large, diverse benchmark of real-world instances.