Bypassing the ASP Bottleneck: Hybrid Grounding by Splitting and Rewriting

Talk by Alexander Beiser

Location: APB 3027
Start: 14. November 2024 at 11:00 am
End: 14. November 2024 at 12:00 pm
Research group: Knowledge-Based Systems
Event series: Research Seminar Logic and AI
iCal

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a key paradigm for problems in artificial intelligence and industrial contexts. In ASP, problems are modeled via a set of rules. Over the time this paradigm grew into a rich language, enabling complex rule types like aggregate expressions. Most practical ASP systems follow a ground-and-solve pattern, where rule schemes are grounded and resulting rules are solved. There, the so-called grounding bottleneck may prevent from solving, due to sheer grounding sizes. Recently, body-decoupled grounding (BDG) [1] demonstrated how to reduce grounding sizes by delegating effort to solving. However, BDG provides limited interoperability with traditional grounders and only covers simple rule types.

Hybrid Grounding, which we presented at IJCAI24 [2], enables interoperability by the introduction of a novel splitting theorem that allows the free combination of BDG with traditional grounders. Further, we extended the handled rule types with aggregates.

In this talk, we will (i) provide an overview of BDG and Hybrid Grounding, along with examples demonstrating the practical benefits of Hybrid Grounding. Further, we (ii) delve into the specifics of BDG, and (iii) finally discuss how Hybrid Grounding achieves interoperability between BDG and state-of-the-art methods.

[1] Viktor Besin, Markus Hecher, and Stefan Woltran. „Body-Decoupled Grounding via Solving: A Novel Approach on the ASP Bottleneck“. In: IJCAI22 (2022).

[2] Alexander Beiser, Markus Hecher, Kaan Unalan, and Stefan Woltran. „Bypassing the ASP Bottleneck: Hybrid Grounding by Splitting and Rewriting“. In: IJCAI24 (2024).