More Like this

1. Resource-guided program synthesis

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3314221.3314602  

   Knoth, Tristan; Wang, Di; Polikarpova, Nadia; Hoffmann, Jan (January 2019, Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation)

   This article presents resource-guided synthesis, a technique for synthesizing recursive programs that satisfy both a functional specification and a symbolic resource bound. The technique is type-directed and rests upon a novel type system that combines polymorphic refinement types with potential annotations of automatic amortized resource analysis. The type system enables efficient constraint-based type checking and can express precise refinement-based resource bounds. The proof of type soundness shows that synthesized programs are correct by construction. By tightly integrating program exploration and type checking, the synthesizer can leverage the user-provided resource bound to guide the search, eagerly rejecting incomplete programs that consume too many resources. An implementation in the resource-guided synthesizer ReSyn is used to evaluate the technique on a range of recursive data structure manipulations. The experiments show that ReSyn synthesizes programs that are asymptotically more efficient than those generated by a resource-agnostic synthesizer. Moreover, synthesis with ReSyn is faster than a naive combination of synthesis and resource analysis. ReSyn is also able to generate implementations that have a constant resource consumption for fixed input sizes, which can be used to mitigate side-channel attacks. 

   more » « less
2. A Decidable Logic for Tree Data-Structures with Measurements

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11245-5_15  

   Qiu, Xiaokang; Wang, Yanjun (January 2019, 20th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation)

   We present DRYADdec, a decidable logic that allows reasoning about tree data-structures with measurements. This logic supports user-defined recursive measure functions based on Max or Sum, and recursive predicates based on these measure functions, such as AVL trees or red-black trees. We prove that the logic’s satisfiability is decidable. The crux of the decidability proof is a small model property which allows us to reduce the satisfiability of DRYADdec to quantifier-free linear arithmetic theory which can be solved efficiently using SMT solvers. We also show that DRYADdec can encode a variety of verification and synthesis problems, including natural proof verification conditions for functional correctness of recursive tree-manipulating programs, legality conditions for fusing tree traversals, synthesis conditions for conditional linear-integer arithmetic functions. We developed the decision procedure and successfully solved 220+ DRYADdec formulae raised from these application scenarios, including verifying functional correctness of programs manipulating AVL trees, red-black trees and treaps, checking the fusibility of height-based mutually recursive tree traversals, and counterexample-guided synthesis from linear integer arithmetic specifications. To our knowledge, DRYADdec is the first decidable logic that can solve such a wide variety of problems requiring flexible combination of measure-related, data-related and shape-related properties for trees. 

   more » « less
3. Bootstrapping Library-Based Synthesis

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_13  

   Huang, Kangjing; Qiu, Xiaokang (December 2022, Lecture notes in computer science)

   Singh, Gagandeep; Urban, Caterina (Ed.)

   Constraint-based program synthesis techniques have been widely used in numerous settings. However, synthesizing programs that use libraries remains a major challenge. To handle complex or black-box libraries, the state of the art is to provide carefully crafted mocks or models to the synthesizer, requiring extra manual work. We address this challenge by proposing TOSHOKAN, a new synthesis framework as an alternative approach in which library-using programs can be generated without any user-provided artifacts at the cost of moderate performance overhead. The framework extends the classic counterexample-guided synthesis framework with a bootstrapping, log-based library model. The model collects input-output samples from running failed candidate programs on witness inputs. We prove that the framework is sound when a sound, bounded verifier is available, and also complete if the underlying synthesizer and verifier promise to produce minimal outputs. We implement and incorporate the framework to JSKETCH, a Java sketching tool. Experiments show that TOSHOKAN can successfully synthesize programs that use a variety of libraries, ranging from mathematical functions to data structures. Comparing to state-of-the-art synthesis algorithms which use mocks or models, TOSHOKAN reduces up to 159 lines of code of required manual inputs, at the cost of less than 40s of performance overheads. 

   more » « less
4. Trace-Guided Inductive Synthesis of Recursive Functional Programs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3591255  

   Yuan, Yongwei; Radhakrishna, Arjun; Samanta, Roopsha (June 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

   We propose a novel trace-guided approach to tackle the challenges of ambiguity and generalization in synthesis of recursive functional programs from input-output examples. Our approach augments the search space of programs with recursion traces consisting of recursive subcalls of the programs. Our method is based on a new version space algebra (VSA) for succinct representation and efficient manipulation of pairs of recursion traces and programs that are consistent with each other. We have implemented this approach in a tool called SyRup and evaluated it on benchmarks from prior work. Our evaluation demonstrates that SyRup not only requires fewer examples to achieve a certain success rate than existing synthesizers, but is also less sensitive to the quality of the examples. 

   more » « less
5. Metric Program Synthesis

   John Feser; Isil Dillig; Armando Solar-Lezama (January 2022, POPL 2022)

   We present a new domain-agnostic synthesis technique for generating programs from input-output examples. Our method, called metric program synthesis, relaxes the well-known observational equivalence idea (used widely in bottom-up enumerative synthesis) into a weaker notion of observational similarity, with the goal of reducing the search space that the synthesizer needs to explore. Our method clusters programs into equivalence classes based on a distance metric and constructs a version space that compactly represents ""approximately correct"" programs. Then, given a ""close enough"" program sampled from this version space, our approach uses a distance-guided repair algorithm to find a program that exactly matches the given input-output examples. We have implemented our proposed metric program synthesis technique in a tool called SyMetric and evaluate it in three different domains considered in prior work. Our evaluation shows that SyMetric outperforms other domain-agnostic synthesizers that use observational equivalence and that it achieves results competitive with domain-specific synthesizers that are either designed for or trained on those domains. 

   more » « less