Related papers: Contractibility for Open Global Constraints
Imposing constraints on the output of a Deep Neural Net is one way to improve the quality of its predictions while loosening the requirements for labeled training data. Such constraints are usually imposed as soft constraints by adding new…
Logic languages based on the theory of rational, possibly infinite, trees have much appeal in that rational trees allow for faster unification (due to the safe omission of the occurs-check) and increased expressivity (cyclic terms can…
In Constraint Programming, global constraints allow to model and solve many combinatorial problems. Among these constraints, several sortedness constraints have been defined, for which propagation algorithms are available, but for which the…
Incorporating constraints is a major concern in probabilistic machine learning. A wide variety of problems require predictions to be integrated with reasoning about constraints, from modelling routes on maps to approving loan predictions.…
Users of program analyses expect that results change predictably in response to changes in their programs, but many analyses fail to provide such robustness. This paper introduces a theoretical framework that provides a unified language to…
Literature on Constraint Satisfaction exhibits the definition of several structural properties that can be possessed by CSPs, like (in)consistency, substitutability or interchangeability. Current tools for constraint solving typically…
A wide range of constraints can be compactly specified using automata or formal languages. In a sequence of recent papers, we have shown that an effective means to reason with such specifications is to decompose them into primitive…
Constraint programming (CP) has been used with great success to tackle a wide variety of constraint satisfaction problems which are computationally intractable in general. Global constraints are one of the important factors behind the…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
Constraint programming is a family of techniques for solving combinatorial problems, where the problem is modelled as a set of decision variables (typically with finite domains) and a set of constraints that express relations among the…
In this paper, we introduce a set of tools for providing user-friendly explanations in an explanation-based constraint programming system. The idea is to represent the constraints of a problem as an hierarchy (a tree). Users are then…
We introduce a variation on Barthe et al.'s higher-order logic in which formulas are interpreted as predicates over open rather than closed objects. This way, concepts which have an intrinsically functional nature, like continuity,…
We show that some common and important global constraints like ALL-DIFFERENT and GCC can be decomposed into simple arithmetic constraints on which we achieve bound or range consistency, and in some cases even greater pruning. These…
Recently, it was shown that any theory of strings containing the string-replace function (even the most restricted version where pattern/replacement strings are both constant strings) becomes undecidable if we do not impose some kind of…
The goal of this paper is to set a constraint programming framework to solve lot-sizing problems. More specifically, we consider a single-item lot-sizing problem with time-varying lower and upper bounds for production and inventory. The…
Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) is a simple and powerful model for concurrency where agents interact by telling and asking constraints. Since their inception, CCP-languages have been designed for having a strong connection to logic.…
The Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is a central and generic computational problem which provides a common framework for many theoretical and practical applications. A central line of research is concerned with the identification of…
We introduce a flexible class of well-quasi-orderings (WQOs) on words that generalizes the ordering of (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. Each such WQO induces a class of piecewise testable languages (PTLs) as Boolean combinations of…
We recommend a programming construct - availability check - for programs that need to automatically adjust to presence or absence of segments of code. The idea is to check the existence of a valid definition before a function call is…
Contraction theory is a mathematical framework for studying the convergence, robustness, and modularity properties of dynamical systems and algorithms. In this opinion paper, we provide five main opinions on the virtues of contraction…