{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Weight-Aware Branch-and-Bound for Weighted Maximum Satisfiability","authors":[{"name":"Jialu Zhang","slug":"jialu-zhang","given":"Jialu","family":"Zhang","affiliation":""},{"name":"Chu-Min Li","slug":"chu-min-li","given":"Chu-Min","family":"Li","affiliation":""},{"name":"Sami Cherif","slug":"sami-cherif","given":"Sami","family":"Cherif","affiliation":""},{"name":"Shuolin Li","slug":"shuolin-li","given":"Shuolin","family":"Li","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"The Weighted Partial MaxSAT (WPMS) problem requires finding an assignment that satisfies all hard clauses while maximizing the total weight of satisfied soft clauses. From a computational perspective, WPMS is not merely an extension of the uniform-weight Partial MaxSAT (PMS); rather, it requires search strategies that actively exploit weight information to navigate the solution space. While state-of-the-art heuristic and SAT-based solvers have successfully integrated weight-aware mechanisms, Branch-and-Bound (BnB) solvers, notably WMaxCDCL, largely treat weight information passively during search and pruning. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing two novel weight-aware strategies into the BnB framework. Our methods integrate weight information directly into the preprocessing and lower-bound estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that these strategies significantly enhance the performance of WMaxCDCL, establishing a new state-of-the-art for exact WPMS solving.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2026/270","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/270","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0270.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/270.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/bibtex/270","volume":{"slug":"2026","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2026","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/","year":2026,"location":"Bremen, Germany","dates":"15-21 August 2026","editors":"Diego Calvanese","isbn":"978-1-956792-09-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2026"},"section":"Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization","track":"Main Track","number":270,"pages":{"first":2427,"last":2436},"keywords":["Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiabilty","Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and tools","Search: Combinatorial search and optimisation","Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint optimization problems"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}