Learn to Unlearn

Clause learning is a significant milestone in the development of SAT solving. However, keeping all learned clauses without discrimination gradually slows down the solver. Thus, selectively removing some learned clauses during routine database reduction is essential. In this paper, we reexamine and test several long-standing ideas for clause removal in the modern solver Kissat. Our experiments show that retaining all clauses alters performance in all instances. For satisfiable instances, periodically removing all learned clauses surprisingly yields near state-of-the-art performance. For unsatisfiable instances, it is vital to always keep some learned clauses. Building on the influential Glucose paper, we find that it is crucial to always retain the clauses most likely to help, regardless of whether they are ranked by size or LBD in practice. Another key factor is whether a clause was used recently during conflict resolution steps. Eagerly keeping used clauses improves all unlearning strategies.