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The goal of programmatic Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is to learn a policy in a programming language that can be used to control a robot’s behavior from a set of user demonstrations. This paper presents a new programmatic LfD algorithm that targets long-horizon robot tasks which require synthesizing programs with complex control flow structures, including nested loops with multiple conditionals. Our proposed method first learns a program sketch that captures the target program’s control flow and then completes this sketch using an LLM-guided search procedure that incorporates a novel technique for proving unrealizability of programming-by-demonstration problems. We have implemented our approach in a new tool called PROLEX and present the results of a comprehensive experimental evaluation on 120 benchmarks involving complex tasks and environments. We show that, given a 120 second time limit, PROLEX can find a program consistent with the demonstrations in 80% of the cases. Furthermore, for 81% of the tasks for which a solution is returned, PROLEX is able to find the ground truth program with just one demonstration. In comparison, CVC5, a syntax-guided synthesis tool, is only able to solve 25% of the cases even when given the ground truth program sketch, and an LLM-based approach, GPT-Synth, is unable to solve any of the tasks due to the environment complexity.
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This content will become publicly available on June 20, 2025
Superfusion: Eliminating Intermediate Data Structures via Inductive Synthesis
Intermediate data structures are a common cause of inefficiency in functional programming.Fusionattempts to eliminate intermediate data structures by combining adjacent data traversals into one; existing fusion techniques, however, are based on predefined rewrite rules and hence are limited in expressiveness. In this work we explore a different approach to eliminating intermediate data structures, based on inductive program synthesis. We dub this approachsuperfusion(by analogy withsuperoptimization, which uses inductive synthesis for program optimization). Starting from a reference program annotated with data structures to be eliminated, superfusion first generates asketchwhere program fragments operating on those data structures are replaced with holes; it then fills the holes with constant-time expressions such that the resulting program is equivalent to the reference. The main technical challenge here is scalability because optimized programs are often complex, making the search space intractably large for naive enumeration. To address this challenge, our key insight is to first synthesize aghost functionthat describes the relationship between the original intermediate data structure and its compressed version; this function, although not used in the final program, serves to decompose the joint sketch filling problem into independent simpler problems for each hole. We implement superfusion in a tool called SuFu and evaluate it on a dataset of 290 tasks collected from prior work on deductive fusion and program restructuring. The results show that SuFu solves 264 out of 290 tasks, exceeding the capabilities of rewriting-based fusion systems and achieving comparable performance with specialized approaches to program restructuring on their respective domains.
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- PAR ID:
- 10555780
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- PLDI
- ISSN:
- 2475-1421
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 939 to 964
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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