Nina Narodytska

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77ranked-venue papers
18as first author
19since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-5181-4560ORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 62 · 14 first-author · 12 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 34 · 9 first-author · 5 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 19 · 5 first-author · 5 since 2021Theory of computation · 12 · 6 first-author · 4 since 2021Computer networks · 3 · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Cubing for Tuning
abstract
We are exploring the problem of building an automated reasoning procedure that adaptively tunes the high-level solving strategy for a given problem. There are two main distinctive characteristics of our approach: tuning is performed solely online, unlike the common use of tuning as an offline process; and tuning data comes exclusively from the given instance, so we do not rely on the availability of similar benchmarks and can work with unique challenging instances. Our approach builds on top of the divide-and-conquer paradigm that naturally serves partitioned sub-problems for an automated tuning algorithm to obtain a good solving strategy. We demonstrate performance improvement on two classes of important problems--SAT-solving and neural network verification--and show that our method can learn unconventional solving strategies in some cases.
Haoze Wu 0001, Clark W. Barrett, Nina Narodytska
AAAI3
2025 Debugging and Runtime Analysis of Neural Networks with VLMs (A Case Study)
abstract
Debugging of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), particularly vision models, is very challenging due to the complex and opaque decision-making processes in these networks. In this paper, we explore multi-modal Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to automatically interpret the opaque representation space of vision models using natural language. This in turn, enables a semantic analysis of model behavior using human-understandable concepts, without requiring costly human annotations. Key to our approach is the notion of semantic heatmap, that succinctly captures the statistical properties of DNNs in terms of the concepts discovered with the VLM and that are computed off-line using a held-out data set. We show the utility of semantic heatmaps for fault localization - an essential step in debugging - in vision models. Our proposed technique helps localize the fault in the network (encoder vs head) and also highlights the responsible high-level concepts, by leveraging novel differential heatmaps, which summarize the semantic differences between the correct and incorrect behaviour of the analyzed DNN. We further propose a lightweight runtime analysis to detect and filter-out defects at runtime, thus improving the reliability of the analyzed DNNs. The runtime analysis works by measuring and comparing the similarity between the heatmap computed for a new (unseen) input and the heatmaps computed a-priori for correct vs incorrect DNN behavior. We consider two types of defects: misclassifications and vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. We demonstrate the debugging and runtime analysis on a case study involving a complex ResNet-based classifier trained on the RIVAL10 dataset.
Boyue Caroline Hu, Divya Gopinath, Corina Pasareanu, Nina Narodytska, Ravi Mangal, Susmit Jha
CAIN4
2025 Integrating Large Language Models in Automated Program Verification
Nina Narodytska
FMCAD1
2025 Per-Instance Subproblem Generation for Strategy Selection in SMT
Amalee Wilson, Nina Narodytska, Clark W. Barrett, Haoze Wu 0001
FMCAD2
2025 Agua: A Concept-Based Explainer for Learning-Enabled Systems
abstract
While deep learning offers superior performance in systems and networking, adoption is often hindered by difficulties in understanding and debugging. Explainability aims to bridge this gap by providing insight into the model's decisions. However, existing methods primarily identify the most influential input features, forcing operators to perform extensive manual analysis of low-level signals (e.g., buffer t - 1).
Dongsu Han, Nina Narodytska, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi
SIGCOMM3
2024 CrystalBox: Future-Based Explanations for Input-Driven Deep RL Systems
abstract
We present CrystalBox, a novel, model-agnostic, posthoc explainability framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers in the large family of input-driven environments which includes computer systems. We combine the natural decomposability of reward functions in input-driven environments with the explanatory power of decomposed returns. We propose an efficient algorithm to generate future-based explanations across both discrete and continuous control environments. Using applications such as adaptive bitrate streaming and congestion control, we demonstrate CrystalBox's capability to generate high-fidelity explanations. We further illustrate its higher utility across three practical use cases: contrastive explanations, network observability, and guided reward design, as opposed to prior explainability techniques that identify salient features.
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, Nina Narodytska
AAAI3
2024 Toward Trustworthy Learning-Enabled Systems with Concept-Based Explanations
abstract
Despite the superior performance of deep learning-based controllers in network applications, their practical adoption is limited due to the difficulty in understanding and trusting them. Existing explainability solutions largely focus on interpreting these controllers by providing insights into the top features used by the model. Although these insights can help reveal an important aspect of the controller, they require operators to deal with low-level features, requiring extensive manual analysis and interpretation.
Dongsu Han, Nina Narodytska, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi
HotNets3
2024 Lemur: Integrating Large Language Models in Automated Program Verification
abstract
The demonstrated code-understanding capability of LLMs raises the question of whether they can be used for automated program verification, a task that demands high-level abstract reasoning about program properties that is challenging for verification tools. We propose a general methodology to combine the power of LLMs and automated reasoners for automated program verification. We formally describe this methodology as a set of derivation rules and prove its soundness. We instantiate the calculus as a sound automated verification procedure, which led to practical improvements on a set of synthetic and competition benchmarks.
Haoze Wu 0001, Clark W. Barrett, Nina Narodytska
ICLR3
2024 Corrigendum to "Learning constraints through partial queries" [Artificial Intelligence 319 (2023) 103896]
Christian Bessiere, Clément Carbonnel, Anton Dries, Emmanuel Hebrard, George Katsirelos, Nadjib Lazaar, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Kostas Stergiou 0001, Dimosthenis C. Tsouros, Toby Walsh
Artif. Intell.7
2023 Eliminating the Impossible, Whatever Remains Must Be True: On Extracting and Applying Background Knowledge in the Context of Formal Explanations
abstract
The rise of AI methods to make predictions and decisions has led to a pressing need for more explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. One common approach for XAI is to produce a post-hoc explanation, explaining why a black box ML model made a certain prediction. Formal approaches to post-hoc explanations provide succinct reasons for why a prediction was made, as well as why not another prediction was made. But these approaches assume that features are independent and uniformly distributed. While this means that “why” explanations are correct, they may be longer than required. It also means the “why not” explanations may be suspect as the counterexamples they rely on may not be meaningful. In this paper, we show how one can apply background knowledge to give more succinct “why” formal explanations, that are presumably easier to interpret by humans, and give more accurate “why not” explanations. In addition, we show how to use existing rule induction techniques to efficiently extract background information from a dataset.
Jinqiang Yu, Alexey Ignatiev, Peter J. Stuckey, Nina Narodytska, João Marques-Silva 0001
AAAI4
2023 The FMCAD 2023 Student Forum
Mikolás Janota, Nina Narodytska
FMCAD2
2023 Learning constraints through partial queries
Christian Bessiere, Clément Carbonnel, Anton Dries, Emmanuel Hebrard, George Katsirelos, Nadjib Lazaar, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Kostas Stergiou 0001, Dimosthenis C. Tsouros, Toby Walsh
Artif. Intell.7
2023 On computing probabilistic abductive explanations
Yacine Izza, Xuanxiang Huang, Alexey Ignatiev, Nina Narodytska, Martin C. Cooper, João Marques-Silva 0001
Int. J. Approx. Reason.4
2022 Constraint-Driven Explanations for Black-Box ML Models
abstract
The need to understand the inner workings of opaque Machine Learning models has prompted researchers to devise various types of post-hoc explanations. A large class of such explainers proceed in two phases: first perturb an input instance whose explanation is sought, and then generate an interpretable artifact to explain the prediction of the opaque model on that instance. Recently, Deutch and Frost proposed to use an additional input from the user: a set of constraints over the input space to guide the perturbation phase. While this approach affords the user the ability to tailor the explanation to their needs, striking a balance between flexibility, theoretical rigor and computational cost has remained an open challenge. We propose a novel constraint-driven explanation generation approach which simultaneously addresses these issues in a modular fashion. Our framework supports the use of expressive Boolean constraints giving the user more flexibility to specify the subspace to generate perturbations from. Leveraging advances in Formal Methods, we can theoretically guarantee strict adherence of the samples to the desired distribution. This also allows us to compute fidelity in a rigorous way, while scaling much better in practice. Our empirical study demonstrates concrete uses of our tool CLIME in obtaining more meaningful explanations with high fidelity.
Aditya A. Shrotri, Nina Narodytska, Alexey Ignatiev, Kuldeep S. Meel, João Marques-Silva 0001, Moshe Y. Vardi
AAAI2
2022 Analysis of Core-Guided MaxSat Using Cores and Correction Sets
Nina Narodytska, Nikolaj S. Bjørner
SAT1
2022 Scalable verification of GNN-based job schedulers
abstract
Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied for scheduling jobs over clusters, achieving better performance than hand-crafted heuristics. Despite their impressive performance, concerns remain over whether these GNN-based job schedulers meet users’ expectations about other important properties, such as strategy-proofness, sharing incentive, and stability. In this work, we consider formal verification of GNN-based job schedulers. We address several domain-specific challenges such as networks that are deeper and specifications that are richer than those encountered when verifying image and NLP classifiers. We develop vegas, the first general framework for verifying both single-step and multi-step properties of these schedulers based on carefully designed algorithms that combine abstractions, refinements, solvers, and proof transfer. Our experimental results show that vegas achieves significant speed-up when verifying important properties of a state-of-the-art GNN-based scheduler compared to previous methods.
Haoze Wu 0001, Clark W. Barrett, Mahmood Sharif, Nina Narodytska, Gagandeep Singh 0001
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.4
2021 Explanations for Monotonic Classifiers
abstract
In many classification tasks there is a requirement of monotonicity. Concretely, if all else remains constant, increasing (resp. decreasing) the value of one or more features must not decrease (resp. increase) the value of the prediction. Despite comprehensive efforts on learning monotonic classifiers, dedicated approaches for explaining monotonic classifiers are scarce and classifier-specific. This paper describes novel algorithms for the computation of one formal explanation of a (black-box) monotonic classifier. These novel algorithms are polynomial (indeed linear) in the run time complexity of the classifier. Furthermore, the paper presents a practically efficient model-agnostic algorithm for enumerating formal explanations.
João Marques-Silva 0001, Thomas Gerspacher, Martin C. Cooper, Alexey Ignatiev, Nina Narodytska
ICML5
2021 Reasoning-Based Learning of Interpretable ML Models
abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely used in decision making procedures in myriads of real-world applications across important practical areas such as finance, healthcare, education, and safety critical systems. Due to its ubiquitous use in safety and privacy critical domains, it is often vital to understand the reasoning behind the AI decisions, which motivates the need for explainable AI (XAI). One of the major approaches to XAI is represented by computing so-called interpretable machine learning (ML) models, such as decision trees (DT), decision lists (DL) and decision sets (DS). These models build on the use of if-then rules and are thus deemed to be easily understandable by humans. A number of approaches have been proposed in the recent past to devising all kinds of interpretable ML models, the most prominent of which involve encoding the problem into a logic formalism, which is then tackled by invoking a reasoning or discrete optimization procedure. This paper overviews the recent advances of the reasoning and constraints based approaches to learning interpretable ML models and discusses their advantages and limitations.
Alexey Ignatiev, João Marques-Silva 0001, Nina Narodytska, Peter J. Stuckey
IJCAI3
2021 Analyzing Learning-Based Networked Systems with Formal Verification
abstract
As more applications of (deep) neural networks emerge in the computer networking domain, the correctness and predictability of a neural agent's behavior for corner case inputs are becoming crucial. Enabling the formal analysis of agents with nontrivial properties, we bridge between specifying intended high-level behavior and expressing low-level statements directly encoded into an efficient verification framework. Our results support that within minutes, one can establish the resilience of a neural network to adversarial attacks on its inputs, as well as formally prove properties that were previously relying on educated guesses. Finally, we also show how formal verification can help create an accurate visual representation of an agent behavior to perform visual inspection and improve its trustworthiness.
Alice Dethise, Marco Canini, Nina Narodytska
INFOCOM3
2020 Verification of Recurrent Neural Networks for Cognitive Tasks via Reachability Analysis
abstract
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are one of the most successful neural network architectures that deal with temporal sequences, e.g., speech and text recognition. Recently, RNNs have been shown to be useful in cognitive neuroscience as a model of decision-making. RNNs can be trained to solve the same behavioral tasks performed by humans and other animals in decision-making experiments, allowing for a direct comparison between networks and experimental subjects. Analysis of RNNs is expected to be a simpler problem than the analysis of neural activity. However, in practice, reasoning about an RNN's behaviour is a challenging problem. In this work, we take an approach based on formal verification for the analysis of RNNs. We make two main contributions. First, we consider the cognitive domain and formally define a set of useful properties to analyse for a popular experimental task. Second, we employ and adapt wellknown verification techniques for reachability analysis to our focus domain, i.e., polytope propagation, invariant detection, and counter-example-guided abstraction refinement. Our experiments show that our techniques can effectively solve classes of benchmark problems that are challenging for state-of-the-art verification tools.
Hongce Zhang, Maxwell Shinn, Aarti Gupta, Arie Gurfinkel, Nham Le, Nina Narodytska
ECAI6
2020 In Search for a SAT-friendly Binarized Neural Network Architecture
Nina Narodytska, Hongce Zhang, Aarti Gupta, Toby Walsh
ICLR1
2020 Explaining Naive Bayes and Other Linear Classifiers with Polynomial Time and Delay
abstract
Recent work proposed the computation of so-called PI-explanations of Naive Bayes Classifiers (NBCs). PI-explanations are subset-minimal sets of feature-value pairs that are sufficient for the prediction, and have been computed with state-of-the-art exact algorithms that are worst-case exponential in time and space. In contrast, we show that the computation of one PI-explanation for an NBC can be achieved in log-linear time, and that the same result also applies to the more general class of linear classifiers. Furthermore, we show that the enumeration of PI-explanations can be obtained with polynomial delay. Experimental results demonstrate the performance gains of the new algorithms when compared with earlier work. The experimental results also investigate ways to measure the quality of heuristic explanations.
João Marques-Silva 0001, Thomas Gerspacher, Martin C. Cooper, Alexey Ignatiev, Nina Narodytska
NeurIPS5
2020 Building Scalable and Flexible Cluster Managers Using Declarative Programming
Lalith Suresh 0001, João Loff, Faria Kalim, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, Nina Narodytska, Leonid Ryzhyk, Sahan Gamage, Brian Oki, Pranshu Jain, Michael Gasch
OSDI5
2019 Abduction-Based Explanations for Machine Learning Models
abstract
The growing range of applications of Machine Learning (ML) in a multitude of settings motivates the ability of computing small explanations for predictions made. Small explanations are generally accepted as easier for human decision makers to understand. Most earlier work on computing explanations is based on heuristic approaches, providing no guarantees of quality, in terms of how close such solutions are from cardinality- or subset-minimal explanations. This paper develops a constraint-agnostic solution for computing explanations for any ML model. The proposed solution exploits abductive reasoning, and imposes the requirement that the ML model can be represented as sets of constraints using some target constraint reasoning system for which the decision problem can be answered with some oracle. The experimental results, obtained on well-known datasets, validate the scalability of the proposed approach as well as the quality of the computed solutions.
Alexey Ignatiev, Nina Narodytska, João Marques-Silva 0001
AAAI2
2019 BDD-Based Algorithms for Packet Classification
abstract
Packet classifiers are the building blocks of modern networking. A classifier determines the action to take on a packet by matching its header against a set of rules. Efficient classification is achieved by using associative memory to perform the match operation in one clock cycle. This requires compressing large rule sets to fit in the small associative memory space available in modern network switches. We propose two symbolic rule set compression algorithms based on binary decision diagrams. Following McGeer and Yalagandula, we formalize the problem as that of obtaining a sequential cover of the rule set. We develop a simple BDD-based algorithm for computing sequential covers, which significantly outperforms state of the art algorithms in terms of compression ratio-a surprising result that highlights the unexplored potential of symbolic techniques in packet classification. Despite this improvement, very large industrial classifiers are still beyond reach. We decompose such classifiers into a pipeline of smaller classifiers over subsets of packet header fields. We then compress each classifier using the sequential cover technique. Our algorithm is able to compress industrial rule sets with hundreds of thousands rules to readily fit in the memory of network switches.
Nina Narodytska, Leonid Ryzhyk, Igor Ganichev, Soner Sevinc
FMCAD1
2019 Synthesizing Cluster Management Code for Distributed Systems
abstract
Management planes for data-center systems are complicated to develop, test, maintain, and evolve. They routinely grapple with hard combinatorial optimization problems like load balancing, placement, scheduling, rolling upgrades and configuration management. To tackle these problems, developers are left with two bad choices: (i) develop ad-hoc mechanisms for systems to solve these optimization problems, or (ii) use specialized solvers that require steep engineering effort.
Lalith Suresh 0001, João Loff, Nina Narodytska, Leonid Ryzhyk, Shmuel Sagiv, Brian Oki
HotOS3
2019 RelGAN: Relational Generative Adversarial Networks for Text Generation
Weili Nie, Nina Narodytska
ICLR (Poster)2
2019 On Relating Explanations and Adversarial Examples
abstract
The importance of explanations (XP's) of machine learning (ML) model predictions and of adversarial examples (AE's) cannot be overstated, with both arguably being essential for the practical success of ML in different settings. There has been recent work on understanding and assessing the relationship between XP's and AE's. However, such work has been mostly experimental and a sound theoretical relationship has been elusive. This paper demonstrates that explanations and adversarial examples are related by a generalized form of hitting set duality, which extends earlier work on hitting set duality observed in model-based diagnosis and knowledge compilation. Furthermore, the paper proposes algorithms, which enable computing adversarial examples from explanations and vice-versa.
Alexey Ignatiev, Nina Narodytska, João Marques-Silva 0001
NeurIPS2
2019 Simple and precise static analysis of untrusted Linux kernel extensions
abstract
Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a Linux subsystem that allows safely executing untrusted user-defined extensions inside the kernel. It relies on static analysis to protect the kernel against buggy and malicious extensions. As the eBPF ecosystem evolves to support more complex and diverse extensions, the limitations of its current verifier, including high rate of false positives, poor scalability, and lack of support for loops, have become a major barrier for developers.
Elazar Gershuni, Nadav Amit, Arie Gurfinkel, Nina Narodytska, Jorge A. Navas, Noam Rinetzky, Leonid Ryzhyk, Shmuel Sagiv
PLDI4
2019 Assessing Heuristic Machine Learning Explanations with Model Counting
Nina Narodytska, Aditya A. Shrotri, Kuldeep S. Meel, Alexey Ignatiev, João Marques-Silva 0001
SAT1
2018 Verifying Properties of Binarized Deep Neural Networks
abstract
Understanding properties of deep neural networks is an important challenge in deep learning. In this paper, we take a step in this direction by proposing a rigorous way of verifying properties of a popular class of neural networks, Binarized Neural Networks, using the well-developed means of Boolean satisfiability. Our main contribution is a construction that creates a representation of a binarized neural network as a Boolean formula. Our encoding is the first exact Boolean representation of a deep neural network. Using this encoding, we leverage the power of modern SAT solvers along with a proposed counterexample-guided search procedure to verify various properties of these networks. A particular focus will be on the critical property of robustness to adversarial perturbations. For this property, our experimental results demonstrate that our approach scales to medium-size deep neural networks used in image classification tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on verifying properties of deep neural networks using an exact Boolean encoding of the network.
Nina Narodytska, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan, Leonid Ryzhyk, Shmuel Sagiv, Toby Walsh
AAAI1
2018 Formal Verification of Deep Neural Networks
abstract
Deep neural networks are among the most successful artificial intelligence technologies making impact in a variety of practical applications. However, many concerns were raised about the `magical' power of these networks. It is disturbing that we are really lacking of understanding of the decision making process behind this technology. Therefore, a natural question is whether we can trust decisions that neural networks make. One way to address this issue is to define properties that we want a neural network to satisfy. Verifying whether a neural network fulfills these properties sheds light on the properties of the function that it represents. In this tutorial, we overview several approaches to verifying neural networks properties. The first set of methods encode neural networks into Integer Linear Programs or Satisfiability Modulo Theory formulas. They come up with domain-specific algorithms to solve verification problems. The second approach is to treat the neural network as a non-linear function and to use global optimization techniques for verification. The third line of work uses abstract interpretation to certify neural networks. Finally, we consider a special class of neural networks - Binarized Neural Networks - that can be represented and analyzed using Boolean Satisfiability. We discuss how we can take advantage of the structure of neural networks in the search procedure.
Nina Narodytska
FMCAD1
2018 Network Approximation using Tensor Sketching
abstract
Deep neural networks are powerful learning models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on many computer vision, speech, and language processing tasks. In this paper, we study a fundamental question that arises when designing deep network architectures: Given a target network architecture can we design a `smaller' network architecture that 'approximates' the operation of the target network? The question is, in part, motivated by the challenge of parameter reduction (compression) in modern deep neural networks, as the ever increasing storage and memory requirements of these networks pose a problem in resource constrained environments.In this work, we focus on deep convolutional neural network architectures, and propose a novel randomized tensor sketching technique that we utilize to develop a unified framework for approximating the operation of both the convolutional and fully connected layers. By applying the sketching technique along different tensor dimensions, we design changes to the convolutional and fully connected layers that substantially reduce the number of effective parameters in a network. We show that the resulting smaller network can be trained directly, and has a classification accuracy that is comparable to the original network.
Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan, Nina Narodytska, Hongxia Jin
IJCAI2
2018 Formal Analysis of Deep Binarized Neural Networks
abstract
Understanding properties of deep neural networks is an important challenge in deep learning. Deep learning networks are among the most successful artificial intelligence technologies that is making impact in a variety of practical applications. However, many concerns were raised about `magical' power of these networks. It is disturbing that we are really lacking of understanding of the decision making process behind this technology. Therefore, a natural question is whether we can trust decisions that neural networks make. One way to address this issue is to define properties that we want a neural network to satisfy. Verifying whether a neural network fulfills these properties sheds light on the properties of the function that it represents. In this work, we take the verification approach. Our goal is to design a framework for analysis of properties of neural networks. We start by defining a set of interesting properties to analyze. Then we focus on Binarized Neural Networks that can be represented and analyzed using well-developed means of Boolean Satisfiability and Integer Linear Programming. One of our main results is an exact representation of a binarized neural network as a Boolean formula. We also discuss how we can take advantage of the structure of neural networks in the search procedure.
Nina Narodytska
IJCAI1
2018 Core-Guided Minimal Correction Set and Core Enumeration
abstract
A set of constraints is unsatisfiable if there is no solution that satisfies these constraints. To analyse unsatisfiable problems, the user needs to understand where inconsistencies come from and how they can be repaired. Minimal unsatisfiable cores and correction sets are important subsets of constraints that enable such analysis. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for extracting minimal unsatisfiable cores and correction sets simultaneously. Building on top of the relaxation and strengthening framework, we introduce novel techniques for extracting these sets. Our new solver significantly outperforms several state of the art algorithms on common benchmarks when it comes to extracting correction sets and compares favorably on core extraction.
Nina Narodytska, Nikolaj S. Bjørner, Maria-Cristina V. Marinescu, Shmuel Sagiv
IJCAI1
2018 Learning Optimal Decision Trees with SAT
abstract
Explanations of machine learning (ML) predictions are of fundamental importance in different settings. Moreover, explanations should be succinct, to enable easy understanding by humans. Decision trees represent an often used approach for developing explainable ML models, motivated by the natural mapping between decision tree paths and rules. Clearly, smaller trees correlate well with smaller rules, and so one challenge is to devise solutions for computing smallest size decision trees given training data. Although simple to formulate, the computation of smallest size decision trees turns out to be an extremely challenging computational problem, for which no practical solutions are known. This paper develops a SAT-based model for computing smallest-size decision trees given training data. In sharp contrast with past work, the proposed SAT model is shown to scale for publicly available datasets of practical interest.
Nina Narodytska, Alexey Ignatiev, João Marques-Silva 0001
IJCAI1
2018 Constrained Image Generation Using Binarized Neural Networks with Decision Procedures
Svyatoslav Korneev, Nina Narodytska, Luca Pulina, Armando Tacchella, Nikolaj S. Bjørner, Shmuel Sagiv
SAT2
2016 A SAT-Based Counterexample Guided Method for Unbounded Synthesis
Alexander Legg, Nina Narodytska, Leonid Ryzhyk
CAV (2)2
2016 Adaptive Condorcet-Based Stopping Rules Can Be Efficient
abstract
A crowdsourcing project is usually comprised of many unit tasks known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). As answers to each HIT varies between workers, each HIT is often contracted to more than one worker to obtain a reliable and consistent enough answer. When implementing a project, an important design decision is how to formulate HITs and how to aggregate workers' answers. These decisions have strong impact on the quality of results and cost of elicitation process. One way to design an efficient elicitation procedure is to use adaptive stopping rules, which allows terminating the elicitation process as soon as a high quality result is guaranteed.
Omer Reingold, Nina Narodytska
ECAI2
2015 SAT-Based Strategy Extraction in Reachability Games
abstract
Reachability games are a useful formalism for the synthesis of reactive systems. Solving a reachability game involves (1) determining the winning player and (2) computing a winning strategy that determines the winning player's action in each state of the game. Recently, a new family of game solvers has been proposed, which rely on counterexample-guided search to compute winning sequences of actions represented as an abstract game tree. While these solvers have demonstrated promising performance in solving the winning determination problem, they currently do not support strategy extraction. We present the first strategy extraction algorithm for abstract game tree-based game solvers. Our algorithm performs SAT encoding of the game abstraction produced by the winner determination algorithm and uses interpolation to compute the strategy. Our experimental results show that our approach performs well on a number of software synthesis benchmarks.
Niklas Eén, Alexander Legg, Nina Narodytska, Leonid Ryzhyk
AAAI3
2015 Equilibria Under the Probabilistic Serial Rule
Haris Aziz 0001, Serge Gaspers, Simon Mackenzie, Nicholas Mattei, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
IJCAI5
2015 Maximum Satisfiability Using Cores and Correction Sets
Nikolaj S. Bjørner, Nina Narodytska
IJCAI2
2014 Maximum Satisfiability Using Core-Guided MaxSAT Resolution
abstract
Core-guided approaches to solving MAXSAT have proved to be effective on industrial problems. These approaches solve a MAXSAT formula by building a sequence of SAT formulas, where in each formula a greater weight of soft clauses can be relaxed. The soft clauses are relaxed via the addition of blocking variables, and the total weight of soft clauses that can be relaxed is limited by placing constraints on the blocking variables. In this work we propose an alternative approach. Our approach also builds a sequence of new SAT formulas. However, these formulas are constructed using MAXSAT resolution, a sound rule of inference for MAXSAT. MAXSAT resolution can in the worst case cause a quadratic blowup in the formula, so we propose a new compressed version of MAXSAT resolution. Using compressed MAXSAT resolution our new core-guided solver improves the state-of-theart, solving significantly more problems than other state-ofthe-art solvers on the industrial benchmarks used in the 2013 MAXSAT Solver Evaluation.
Nina Narodytska, Fahiem Bacchus
AAAI1
2014 A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Catalog Optimization
abstract
Vendors of all types face the problem of selecting a slate of product offerings—their assortment or catalog—that will maximize their profits. The profitability of a catalog is determined by both customer preferences and the offerings of their competitors. We develop a game-theoretic model for analyzing the vendor catalog optimization problem in the face of competing vendors. We show that computing a best response is intractable in general, but can be solved by dynamic programming given certain informational or structural assumptions about consumer preferences. We also analyze conditions under which pure Nash equilibria exist and provide several price of anarchy/stability results
Joel Oren, Nina Narodytska, Craig Boutilier
AAAI2
2014 Solving Games without Controllable Predecessor
Nina Narodytska, Alexander Legg, Fahiem Bacchus, Leonid Ryzhyk
CAV1
2014 How Hard Is It to Control an Election by Breaking Ties?
abstract
We study the computational complexity of controlling the result of an election by breaking ties strategically. This problem is equivalent to the problem of deciding the winner of an election under parallel universes tie-breaking. When the chair of the election is only asked to break ties to choose between one of the co-winners, the problem is trivially easy. However, in multi-round elections, we prove that it can be NP-hard for the chair to compute how to break ties to ensure a given result. Additionally, we show that the form of the tie-breaking function can increase the opportunities for control.
Nicholas Mattei, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
ECAI2
2014 The Computational Impact of Partial Votes on Strategic Voting
abstract
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count), elimination style rules (like single transferable vote) and rules based on the tournament graph (like Copeland) respectively. We argue that with an elimination style voting rule like single transferable vote, partial voting does not change the situations where strategic voting is possible. However, with scoring rules and rules based on the tournament graph, partial voting can increase the situations where strategic voting is possible. As a consequence, the computational complexity of computing a strategic vote can change. For example, with Borda count, the complexity of computing a strategic vote can decrease or stay the same depending on how we score partial votes.
Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
ECAI1
2014 Reasoning about Constraint Models
Christian Bessiere, Emmanuel Hebrard, George Katsirelos, Zeynep Kiziltan, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
PRICAI5
2014 Cores in Core Based MaxSat Algorithms: An Analysis
Fahiem Bacchus, Nina Narodytska
SAT2
2014 Complexity of and algorithms for the manipulation of Borda, Nanson's and Baldwin's voting rules
Jessica Davies 0001, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh, Lirong Xia
Artif. Intell.3
2013 Ties Matter: Complexity of Manipulation when Tie-Breaking with a Random Vote
abstract
We study the impact on strategic voting of tie-breaking by means of considering the order of tied candidates within a random vote. We compare this to another non deterministic tie-breaking rule where we simply choose candidate uniformly at random. In general, we demonstrate that there is no connection between the computational complexity of computing a manipulating vote with the two different types of tie-breaking. However, we prove that for some scoring rules, the computational complexity of computing a manipulation can increase from polynomial to NP-hard. We also discuss the relationship with the computational complexity of computing a manipulating vote when we ask for a candidate to be the unique winner, or to be among the set of co-winners.
Haris Aziz 0001, Serge Gaspers, Nicholas Mattei, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
AAAI4
2013 Strategic Behavior when Allocating Indivisible Goods Sequentially
abstract
We study a simple sequential allocation mechanism for allocating indivisible goods between agents in which agents take turns to pick items.We focus on agents behaving strategically. We view the allocation procedure as a finite repeated game with perfect information. We show that with just two agents, we can compute the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in linear time. With more agents, computing the subgame perfect Nash equilibria is more difficult. There can be an exponential number of equilibria and computing even one of them is PSPACE-hard. We identify a special case, when agents value many of the items identically, where we can efficiently compute the subgame perfect Nash equilibria. We also consider the effect of externalities and modifications to the mechanism that make it strategy proof.
Thomas Kalinowski, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh, Lirong Xia
AAAI2
2013 Breaking Symmetry with Different Orderings
Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CP1
2013 An Adaptive Model Restarts Heuristic
Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CPAIOR1
2013 Constraint Acquisition via Partial Queries
Christian Bessiere, Remi Coletta, Emmanuel Hebrard, George Katsirelos, Nadjib Lazaar, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh
IJCAI6
2013 On the Complexity of Global Scheduling Constraints under Structural Restrictions
Geoffrey Chu, Serge Gaspers, Nina Narodytska, Andreas Schutt, Toby Walsh
IJCAI3
2013 A Social Welfare Optimal Sequential Allocation Procedure
Thomas Kalinowski, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
IJCAI2
2013 Three Generalizations of the FOCUS Constraint
Nina Narodytska, Thierry Petit, Mohamed Siala 0002, Toby Walsh
IJCAI1
2013 Constraint satisfaction problems: Convexity makes AllDifferent constraints tractable
Michael R. Fellows, Tobias Friedrich 0001, Danny Hermelin, Nina Narodytska, Frances A. Rosamond
Theor. Comput. Sci.4
2012 Eliminating the Weakest Link: Making Manipulation Intractable?
abstract
Successive elimination of candidates is often a route to making manipulation intractable to compute. We prove that eliminating candidates does not necessarily increase the computational complexity of manipulation. However, for many voting rules used in practice, the computational complexity increases. For example, it is already known that it is NP-hard to compute how a single voter can manipulate the result of single transferable voting (the elimination version of plurality voting). We show here that it is NP-hard to compute how a single voter can manipulate the result of the elimination version of veto voting, of the closely related Coombs’ rule, and of the elimination versions of a general class of scoring rules.
Jessica Davies 0001, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
AAAI2
2012 The SeqBin Constraint Revisited
George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CP2
2011 Complexity of and Algorithms for Borda Manipulation
abstract
We prove that it is NP-hard for a coalition of two manipulators to compute how to manipulate the Borda voting rule. This resolves one of the last open problems in the computational complexity of manipulating common voting rules. Because of this NP-hardness, we treat computing a manipulation as an approximation problem where we try to minimize the number of manipulators. Based on ideas from bin packing and multiprocessor scheduling, we propose two new approximation methods to compute manipulations of the Borda rule. Experiments show that these methods significantly outperform the previous best known approximation method. We are able to find optimal manipulations in almost all the randomly generated elections tested. Our results suggest that, whilst computing a manipulation of the Borda rule by a coalition is NP-hard, computational complexity may provide only a weak barrier against manipulation in practice.
Jessica Davies 0001, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
AAAI3
2011 Manipulation of Nanson's and Baldwin's Rules
abstract
Nanson's and Baldwin's voting rules selecta winner by successively eliminatingcandidates with low Borda scores. We showthat these rules have a number of desirablecomputational properties. In particular,with unweighted votes, it isNP-hard to manipulate either rule with one manipulator, whilstwith weighted votes, it isNP-hard to manipulate either rule with a small number ofcandidates and a coalition of manipulators.As only a couple of other voting rulesare known to be NP-hard to manipulatewith a single manipulator, Nanson'sand Baldwin's rules appearto be particularly resistant to manipulation from a theoretical perspective.We also propose a number of approximation methodsfor manipulating these two rules.Experiments demonstrate that both rules areoften difficult to manipulate in practice.These results suggest that elimination stylevoting rules deserve further study.
Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh, Lirong Xia
AAAI1
2011 The AllDifferent Constraint with Precedences
Christian Bessiere, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh
CPAIOR2
2011 Constraint Satisfaction Problems: Convexity Makes AllDifferent Constraints Tractable
abstract
We examine the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems that consist of a set of AllDiff constraints. Such CSPs naturally model a wide range of real-world and combinatorial problems, like scheduling, frequency allocations and graph coloring problems. As this problem is known to be NP-complete, we investigate under which further assumptions it becomes tractable. We observe that a crucial property seems to be the convexity of the variable domains and constraints. Our main contribution is an extensive study of the complexity of Multiple AllDiff CSPs for a set of natural parameters, like maximum domain size and maximum size of the constraint scopes. We show that, depending on the parameter, convexity can make the problem tractable while it is provably intractable in general
Michael R. Fellows, Tobias Friedrich 0001, Danny Hermelin, Nina Narodytska, Frances A. Rosamond
IJCAI4
2011 The Complexity of Integer Bound Propagation
abstract
Bound propagation is an important Artificial Intelligence technique used in Constraint Programming tools to deal with numerical constraints. It is typically embedded within a search procedure (”branch and prune”) and used at every node of the search tree to narrow down the search space, so it is critical that it be fast. The procedure invokes constraint propagators until a common fixpoint is reached, but the known algorithms for this have a pseudo-polynomial worst-case time complexity: they are fast indeed when the variables have a small numerical range, but they have the well-known problem of being prohibitively slow when these ranges are large. An important question is therefore whether strongly-polynomial algorithms exist that compute the common bound consistent fixpoint of a set of constraints. This paper answers this question. In particular we show that this fixpoint computation is in fact NP-complete, even when restricted to binary linear constraints.
Lucas Bordeaux, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Moshe Y. Vardi
J. Artif. Intell. Res.3
2010 Propagating Conjunctions of AllDifferent Constraints
abstract
We study propagation algorithms for the conjunction of two AllDifferent constraints. Solutions of an AllDifferent constraint can be seen as perfect matchings on the variable/value bipartite graph. Therefore, we investigate the problem of finding simultaneous bipartite matchings. We present an extension of the famous Hall theorem which characterizes when simultaneous bipartite matchings exists. Unfortunately, finding such matchings is NP-hard in general. However, we prove a surprising result that finding a simultaneous matching on a convex bipartite graph takes just polynomial time. Based on this theoretical result, we provide the first polynomial time bound consistency algorithm for the conjunction of two AllDifferent constraints. We identify a pathological problem on which this propagator is exponentially faster compared to existing propagators. Our experiments show that this new propagator can offer significant benefits over existing methods.
Christian Bessiere, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh
AAAI3
2010 Decomposition of the NValue Constraint
Christian Bessiere, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh
CP3
2010 On the Complexity and Completeness of Static Constraints for Breaking Row and Column Symmetry
George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CP2
2009 Restricted Global Grammar Constraints
George Katsirelos, Sebastian Maneth, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CP3
2009 Reformulating Global Grammar Constraints
George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CPAIOR2
2009 Decompositions of All Different, Global Cardinality and Related Constraints
Christian Bessiere, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh
IJCAI3
2009 Circuit Complexity and Decompositions of Global Constraints
Christian Bessiere, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
IJCAI3
2008 Flow-Based Propagators for the SEQUENCE and Related Global Constraints
Michael J. Maher, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh
CP2
2008 The Weighted CfgConstraint
George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
CPAIOR2
2007 Encodings of the Sequence Constraint
Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Peter J. Stuckey, Toby Walsh
CP2
2007 Constraint and Variable Ordering Heuristics for Compiling Configuration Problems
Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
IJCAI1