From hubertmingchen at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 11:53:37 2025 From: hubertmingchen at gmail.com (Hubie Chen) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2025 10:53:37 +0100 Subject: [Proof Complexity] Call for submissions: QBF '25 Message-ID: ==================== International Workshop on Quantified Boolean Formulas and Beyond https://qbf.pages.sai.jku.at/qbf25/ In conjunction with SAT 2025 ==================== =========== Overview =========== Quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) are an extension of propositional logic which allows for explicit quantification over propositional variables. The decision problem of QBF is PSPACE-complete, compared to the NP-completeness of the decision problem of propositional logic (SAT). Many problems from application domains such as model checking, formal verification or synthesis are PSPACE-complete, and hence could be encoded in QBF in a natural way. Considerable progress has been made in QBF solving throughout the past years. However, in contrast to SAT, QBF is not yet widely applied to practical problems in academic or industrial settings. For example, the extraction and validation of models of (un)satisfiability of QBFs has turned out to be challenging, given that state-of-the-art solvers implement different solving paradigms. The goal of the International Workshop on Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF Workshop) is to bring together researchers working on theoretical and practical aspects of QBF solving and extensions like DQBF. In addition to that, it addresses (potential) users of QBF in order to reflect on the state-of-the-art and to consolidate on immediate and long-term research challenges. The workshop also welcomes work on reasoning with quantifiers in related problems, such as dependency QBF (DQBF), quantified constraint satisfaction problems (QCSP), and satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) with quantifiers. =========== About QBF =========== Continued improvements in the performance of propositional satisfiability (SAT) solvers are enabling a growing number of applications in the area of electronic design automation, such as model checking, synthesis, and symbolic execution. SAT solvers are also a driving force behind recent progress in constrained sampling and counting, and competitive planning tools. In most of these cases, SAT solvers deal with problems from complexity classes beyond NP and propositional encodings that grow super-polynomially in the size of the original instances. Clever techniques such as incremental solving can partly alleviate this issue, but ultimately the underlying asymptotics lead to formulas that are too large to be solved by even the most efficient SAT solvers. This has prompted the development of decision procedures for more succinct generalizations of propositional logic such as Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs), which allow for explicit quantification over truth values. The decision problem of QBF is PSPACE-complete, and thus many problems from application domains such as model checking, formal verification or synthesis-which happen to be PSPACE-complete-could be succinctly encoded in QBF. Considerable progress has been made in QBF solving throughout the past years. However, in contrast to SAT, QBF solvers generally do not scale well enough on practically relevant problems arising in an industrial setting. * The main aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on QBF theory and solver developers so as to further our theoretical understanding of this hardness and find ways of overcoming it in practice. It provides a forum in which the community can identify immediate and long-term research challenges. That includes (potential) users, which are invited to reflect on the current state-of-the-art and identify obstacles to the adoption of QBF solvers as well as specific problems (instances) for developers to target. * Researchers in other areas of automated reasoning face similar problems in lifting techniques and algorithms for quantifier-free formulas to a quantified version. For instance, this is the case in Quantified Constrained Satisfaction Problems (QCSP), or Sat Modulo Theory (SMT) with quantifiers. This workshop also seeks to promote an exchange of ideas and collaboration between researchers working on QBF and those in other subfields of automated reasoning that deal with quantification. * Recent years have seen research on Dependency QBF (DQBF), which further generalize QBFs by allowing non-linear quantifier prefixes. Given that DQBF evaluation is NEXP-complete, and in view of the difficulties presented by QBF solving, the development of DQBF solvers may seem futile. However, the trade-off between succinctness and complexity offered by DQBF may be favorable in practice. The workshop also aims to be a platform for research on formalisms that go beyond QBF in this way. =========== Submission =========== Submissions of extended abstracts are invited and will be managed via Easychair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qbf25 In particular, we invite the submission of extended abstracts on work that has been published already, novel unpublished work, or work in progress. The following forms of submissions are solicited: * Proposals for short tutorial presentations * Talk abstracts reporting on already published work * Talk proposals presenting work that is unpublished or in progress. Submissions which describe novel applications of QBF or related formalisms in various domains are particularly welcome. Additionally, this call comprises known applications which have been shown to be hard for QBF solvers in the past as well as new applications for which present QBF solvers might lack certain features still to be identified. Each submission should have an overall length of 1-4 pages in LNCS format. Authors may decide to include an appendix with additional material. Appendices will be considered at the reviewers? discretion. The accepted extended abstracts will be published on the workshop webpage. The workshop does not have formal proceedings. Authors of accepted contributions are expected to give a talk at the workshop. There are two submission deadlines. If submitted before the first deadline has passed, the notification will be before the early registration deadline of SAT. =========== Program Committee =========== * Hubie Chen, King's College London * Leroy Chew, TU Wien * Martina Seidl, JKU Linz * Friedrich Slivovsky, Univ. Liverpool =========== Important Dates =========== * June 10: 1st submission deadline (round 1 deadline) * June 22: notification of round 1 * July 10: 2nd submission round (round 2 deadline) * July 22: notification of round 2 * August 11: workshop == Contact qbf25 at easychair.org From jn at di.ku.dk Wed Jun 11 21:01:35 2025 From: jn at di.ku.dk (=?UTF-8?Q?Jakob_Nordstr=C3=B6m?=) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2025 21:01:35 +0200 Subject: [Proof Complexity] Call for Participation CP/SAT/SoCS 2025 (early-bird rate until 30th June) Message-ID: <1c898e92-7e68-431d-8db8-69666ea10b8b@di.ku.dk> Dear colleagues, For those of us interested in the connection between proof complexity and combinatorial algorithms, there is a pretty unique opportunity to hear more about applied and theoretical research at the 31st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2025), the 28th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2025), and the 18th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2025), which will be held together at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, from 12th to 15th August 2025. Alongside the three conferences, we also have a joint CP/SAT doctoral program, as well as a two-day workshop programme on the 10th and 11th August featuring: - the 23rd International Workshop on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) - the 1st Workshop on Explanations with Constraints and Satisfiability (ExCoS) - Machine Learning for Solvers and Provers (ML4SP) - the 2nd International Workshop on Discrete Optimization with Soft Constraints - LLMs meet Constraint Solving - the 24th workshop on Constraint Modelling and Reformulation (ModRef) - the 16th Pragmatics of SAT international workshop - the Workshop on Counting, Sampling, and Synthesis - the International Workshop on Quantified Boolean Formulas and Beyond - the Eighth Workshop on Progress Towards the Holy Grail (PTHG-25). There is a single, shared registration fee that will give you access to all three conferences and all of the workshops. For details, please see: https://satisfiability.org/SAT25/local/ Early registration rates end on the 30th June. We also recommend booking accommodation well in advance, since the World Pipe Band Championships and the Edinburgh Festival are running at the same time as the conference. Finally, we would like to draw your attention to a related event, the SAT/SMT/AR Summer School, which will also be taking in place in Scotland the week before our conferences: https://sat-smt-ar-school.gitlab.io/www/2025/ Looking forward to seeing you to Glasgow, Jeremias Berg and Jakob Nordstr?m SAT 2025 program committee chairs