GaloisSAT: Differentiable Boolean Satisfiability Solving via Finite Field Algebra
Authors: Curie Kim, Carsten Portner, Mingju Liu, Steve Dai, Haoxing Ren, Brucek Khailany, Alvaro Velasquez, Ismail Alkhouri, Cunxi Yu
Organizations: University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. · NVIDIA Research, Santa Clara, CA, USA. · NVIDIA Research, Austin, TX, USA. · University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA. · University of Michigan,Ann Arbor, MI, USA. · NVIDIA Research, College Park, MD, USA.
Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem, the first problem proven to be NP-complete, has become a fundamental challenge in computational complexity, with widespread applications in optimization and verification across many domains. Despite significant algorithmic advances over the past two decades, the performance of SAT solvers has improved at a limited pace. Notably, the 2025 competition winner shows only about a 2X improvement over the 2006 winner in SAT Competition performance after nearly 20 years of effort. This paper introduces GaloisSAT, a novel hybrid GPU-CPU SAT solver that integrates a differentiable SAT solving engine powered by modern machine learning infrastructure on GPUs, followed by a traditional CDCL-based SAT solving stage on CPUs. GaloisSAT is benchmarked against the latest versions of state-of-the-art solvers, Kissat and CaDiCaL, using the SAT Competition 2024 benchmark suite. Results demonstrate substantial improvements in the official SAT Competition metric PAR-2 (penalized average runtime with a timeout of 5,000 seconds and a penalty factor of 2). Specifically, GaloisSAT achieves an 8.41X speedup in the satisfiable category and a 1.29X speedup in the unsatisfiable category compared to the strongest baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of GaloisSAT architecture and solving flow. (a) GPU Module . Preprocessing and the forward pass for clause evaluation are indicated by solid arrows, while dashed arrows denote backpropagation enabling gradient-based optimization. (b) CPU Module . Parallel CDCL solving, using high-confidence partial assignments for SAT and branching on low-confidence variables for UNSAT to guarantee completeness.
Figure 2: Performance comparison between baseline solvers Kissat , CaDiCaL and their Galois -augmented variants, as well as TurboSAT(CaDiCaL) , on the 179 satisfiable instances from the SAT Competition 2024 dataset. *Note that the PAR-2 scores for GaloisSAT account for the total end-to-end runtime of the entire GPU+CPU solving flow.
Figure 3: Distribution of speedups on satisfiable instances from the SAT Competition 2024 benchmarks. Both (a) GaloisSAT(Kissat) and (b) GaloisSAT(CaDiCaL) achieve substantial improvements on over 70% of the instances.
Solver
Avg. PAR-2 ↓
Solved
Solved Rate
GaloisSAT(Kissat)
174.79
179 /179
100.0%
Kissat
1470.60
157/179
87.7%
GaloisSAT(CaDiCaL)
457.76
174 /179
97.2%
TurboSAT(CaDiCaL)
972.28
165/179
92.2%
CaDiCaL
2076.91
148/179
82.7%
Table 1: Performance comparison with SOTA SAT solvers.
Table 2: Top satisfiable instances showing the largest runtime reductions achieved by GaloisSAT . Both GaloisSAT(Kissat) and GaloisSAT(CaDiCaL) deliver substantial gains, frequently exceeding two-digit speedups and reaching up to three orders of magnitude compared to their backbone solvers. In most cases, GaloisSAT(CaDiCaL) also surpasses TurboSAT(CaDiCaL) . Entries marked as TO indicate timeouts.
Figure 4: Performance comparison between baseline solvers Kissat , CaDiCaL and their Galois -augmented variants on the 214 unsatisfiable instances from the SAT Competition 2024 dataset. *Note that the PAR-2 scores for GaloisSAT account for the total end-to-end runtime of the GPU+CPU solving flow.
# GPUs
Batch
Avg. Load (s)
Avg. Train (s)
Avg. Total GPU (s)
2×A100
500
1.39
9.03
10.42
1,000
1.29
17.90
19.19
3,000
1.46
52.31
53.77
8×A100
3,000
3.45
15.24
18.69
Table 3: Average GPU runtime on the SAT instances from the SAT Competition 2024 benchmarks across different hardware configurations and training settings.
Solver
Batch
Avg. PAR-2 ↓
Solved
Solved Rate
GaloisSAT(Kissat)
3,000
174.79
179/179
100.0%
1,000
229.77
178/179
99.4%
500
241.68
178/179
99.4%
GaloisSAT(CaDiCaL)
3,000
457.76
174/179
97.2%
1,000
367.50
176/179
98.3%
500
394.98
175/179
97.8%
Table 4: End-to-end solver performance across different batch sizes, along with baseline results. All Galois -enhanced solvers were trained using 2 × A100 GPUs with a number of epochs of 10.
Result Type
Proportion (%)
Satisfiable (succeeded partial assignments)
78.58
Timeout
15.44
Unsatisfiable (failed partial assignments)
5.59
Unknown
0.34
Table 5: Candidate pool quality for 100 generated candidates per satisfiable instance (179 instances) from the SAT Competition 2024 dataset, evaluated using Kissat . Each result type shows the proportion of candidates under this configuration.
We present Accelerated Fourier SAT (AFSAT), a GPU-accelerated solver for pseudo-Boolean satisfiability based on continuous local search (CLS). AFSAT realises the proof-of-concept approach, FastFourierSAT, into a fully-engineered solver supporting any heterogeneous mixture of symmetric constraint types and lengths within a single problem instance. Using the JAX compiler, AFSAT leverages pure function composition, automatic vectorisation, automatic differentiation, and just-in-time (JIT) compilation to perform massively parallel CLS across batches of candidate assignments. We demonstrate substantially improved numerical stability, runtime performance, and memory efficiency over the proof-of-concept. We achieve this by way of identifying and addressing various limitations that arise from memory latency and floating-point representation, as well as leveraging automatic parallelisation and compact representations. The inherent representational and stability limitations of floating point are partially addressed by a tailored discrete Fourier transform implementation. We achieve near-linear throughput when scaling to multiple accelerators via JAX array sharding.
Cody J Christopher, Charles Gretton
School of Computing, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Learning-based approaches to NP-hard problems have shown increasing promise, but their progress is fundamentally constrained by the high cost of generating labeled training data. In domains such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT), standard pipelines rely on solver-in-the-loop labeling, which scales poorly with problem size and limits the amount of usable supervision. This bottleneck hinders the broader goal of leveraging machine learning to capture structure in hard combinatorial problems. In this work, we propose a target-aware, solver-free data generation framework for SAT that produces correctly labeled SAT and UNSAT instances by construction, eliminating the need for expensive solver calls. Our method aligns generated instances with the structural properties of a target benchmark, making synthetic data effective for downstream learning. We further develop a linear-programming-aware graph neural network (LPGNN) architecture that incorporates constraint-violation residuals into message passing, enabling the model to exploit underlying optimization structure. Together, these contributions support a data-centric paradigm for learning on NP-hard problems, where scalable, task-aligned data generation is as critical as model design. Our approach yields orders-of-magnitude speedups in data generation, demonstrating that benchmark-aligned synthetic data can effectively augment solver-labeled datasets for GNN-based SAT prediction.
Eshed Gal, Uri Ascher, Eldad Haber
Department of Computer Science The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada · Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada
Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers are foundational to software verification, program analysis, and compiler testing, particularly over the theory of Quantifier-Free Floating-Point (QF_FP). While recent optimization-based SMT solvers have successfully applied gradient descent to continuous relaxations of logical formulas, they are fundamentally bottlenecked by gradient domination, a phenomenon where a small subset of difficult clauses hijacks the optimization trajectory, preventing the solver from satisfying the broader formula and trapping it in local minima. To overcome this, we present GradSAT, a novel framework that bridges optimization-based SMT solving with Multi-Task Learning (MTL). GradSAT reformulates the constraint satisfaction process by treating each SMT clause as an independent MTL task. By applying dynamic gradient normalization (GradNorm), GradSAT actively balances the gradient magnitudes across all clauses at runtime, systematically penalizing dominant gradients and accelerating lagging clauses to ensure uniform convergence. GradSAT implements this through a highly optimized, two-stage hybrid pipeline. First, a GPU-accelerated PyTorch backend leveraging symbolic compilation and operator fusion navigates the continuous relaxation to a high-quality basin. Second, the candidate assignment is handed off to a bit-precise local search engine to rapidly resolve the exact, rigorous assignment. By stabilizing the continuous search dynamics, GradSAT mitigates the brittleness of prior gradient-based solvers and provides a robust, highly parallelizable architecture for complex constraint solving.