General instability-addressability conjecture for SMT solvers

Determine whether the instability encountered by users of SMT solvers is addressable rather than fundamental across SMT solving, beyond the common outcome-instability cause addressed through quantifier-generation accounting.

Background

The paper studies outcome instability in SMT solving, particularly cases in which seemingly minor input changes cause an unsatisfiable query to become unknown or time out. It focuses on one common source of this behavior: non-confluent generation accounting for E-matching-based quantifier instantiation.

The broader claim that practical SMT-solver instability is generally addressable is attributed to recent work and is not established by the paper, which addresses only a particular source of instability through a new generation-accounting method.