Unifying Reasoning and Core-Guided Search for Maximum Satisfiability.

A central algorithmic paradigm in maximum satisfiability solving geared towards real-world optimization problems is the core-guided approach. Furthermore, recent progress on preprocessing techniques is bringing in additional reasoning techniques to MaxSAT solving. Towards realizing their combined potential, understanding formal underpinnings of interleavings of preprocessing-style reasoning and core-guided algorithms is important. It turns out that earlier proposed notions for establishing correctness of core-guided algorithms and preprocessing, respectively, are not enough for capturing correctness of interleavings of the techniques. We provide an in-depth analysis of these and related MaxSAT instance transformations, and propose correction set reducibility as a notion that captures inprocessing MaxSAT solving within a state-transition style abstract MaxSAT solving framework. Furthermore, we establish a general theorem of correctness for applications of SAT-based preprocessing techniques in MaxSAT. The results pave way for generic techniques for arguing about the formal correctness of MaxSAT algorithms.