Accelerating search-based program synthesis using learned probabilistic models

Abstract

A key challenge in program synthesis concerns how to efficiently search for the desired program in the space of possible programs. We propose a general approach to accelerate search-based program synthesis by biasing the search towards likely programs. Our approach targets a standard formulation, syntax-guided synthesis (SyGuS), by extending the grammar of possible programs with a probabilistic model dictating the likelihood of each program. We develop a weighted search algorithm to efficiently enumerate programs in order of their likelihood. We also propose a method based on transfer learning that enables to effectively learn a powerful model, called probabilistic higher-order grammar, from known solutions in a domain. We have implemented our approach in a tool called Euphony and evaluate it on SyGuS benchmark problems from a variety of domains. We show that Euphony can learn good models using easily obtainable solutions, and achieves significant performance gains over existing general-purpose as well as domain-specific synthesizers.