The FO Model Counting problem (FOMC) is the following: given a sentence Φ in FO and a number n, compute the number of models of Φ over a domain of size n; the Weighted variant (WFOMC) generalizes the problem by associating a weight to each tuple and defining the weight of a model to be the product of weights of its tuples. In this paper we study the complexity of the symmetric WFOMC, where all tuples of a given relation have the same weight. Our motivation comes from an important application, inference in Knowledge Bases with soft constraints, like Markov Logic Networks, but the problem is also of independent theoretical interest. We study both the data complexity, and the combined complexity of FOMC and WFOMC. For the data complexity we prove the existence of an FO3 formula for which FOMC is #P1-complete, and the existence of a Conjunctive Query for which WFOMC is #P1-complete. We also prove that all γ-acyclic queries have polynomial time data complexity. For the combined complexity, we prove that, for every fragment FOk, k ≥ 2, the combined complexity of FOMC (or WFOMC) is #P-complete.

@inproceedings{BeamePODS15,
  author    = {Beame, Paul and Van den Broeck, Guy and Gribkoff, Eric and Suciu, Dan},
  title     = {Symmetric Weighted First-Order Model Counting},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS)},
  year      = {2015},
  url = {http://starai.cs.ucla.edu/papers/BeamePODS15.pdf},
  keywords   = {conference,selective}
}