Scaling Neural Program Synthesis with Distribution-Based Search

No. 6: AAAI-22 Technical Tracks 6

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36

AAAI Technical Track on Machine Learning I

We consider the problem of automatically constructing computer programs from input-output examples. We investigate how to augment probabilistic and neural program synthesis methods with new search algorithms, proposing a framework called distribution-based search. Within this framework, we introduce two new search algorithms: Heap Search, an enumerative method, and SQRT Sampling, a probabilistic method. We prove certain optimality guarantees for both methods, show how they integrate with probabilistic and neural techniques, and demonstrate how they can operate at scale across parallel compute environments. Collectively these findings offer theoretical and applied studies of search algorithms for program synthesis that integrate with recent developments in machine-learned program synthesizers.

10.1609/aaai.v36i6.20616