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Library learning compresses a given corpus of programs by extracting common structure from the corpus into reusable library functions. Prior work on library learning suffers from two limitations that prevent it from scaling to larger, more complex inputs. First, it explores too many candidate library functions that are not useful for compression. Second, it is not robust to syntactic variation in the input. We propose library learning modulo theory (LLMT), a new library learning algorithm that additionally takes as input an equational theory for a given problem domain. LLMT uses e-graphs and equality saturation to compactly represent the space of programs equivalent modulo the theory, and uses a novel e-graph anti-unification technique to find common patterns in the corpus more directly and efficiently. We implemented LLMT in a tool named babble. Our evaluation shows that babble achieves better compression orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art. We also provide a qualitative evaluation showing that babble learns reusable functions on inputs previously out of reach for library learning.

Many problem domains, including program synthesis and rewrite-based optimization, require searching astronomically large spaces of programs. Existing approaches often rely on building specialized data structures—version-space algebras, finite tree automata, or e-graphs—to compactly represent such spaces. At their core, all these data structures exploit independence of subterms; as a result, they cannot efficiently represent more complex program spaces, where the choices of subterms are entangled. We introduce equality-constrained tree automata (ECTAs), a new data structure, designed to compactly represent large spaces of programs with entangled subterms. We present efficient algorithms for extracting programs from ECTAs, implemented in a performant Haskell library, ecta. Using the ecta library, we construct Hectare, a type-driven program synthesizer for Haskell. Hectare significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art synthesizer Hoogle+—providing an average speedup of 8×—despite its implementation being an order of magnitude smaller.

Regular expressions are a popular target for programming by example (PBE) systems, which seek to learn regexes from user-provided examples. Synthesizing from only positive examples remains an unsolved challenge, as the unrestricted search space makes it difficult to avoid over- and under- generalizing. Prior work has approached this in two ways: search-based techniques which require extra input, such as user feedback and/or a natural language description, and neural techniques. The former puts an extra burden on the user, while the latter requires large representative training data sets which are almost nonexistent for this domain. To tackle this challenge we present Regex+, a search-based syn- thesizer that infers regexes from just a few positive examples. Regex+ avoids over/under-generalization by using minimum description length (MDL) learning, adapted to version space algebras in order to efficiently search for an optimal regex according to a compositional MDL ranking function. Our evaluation shows that Regex+ more than triples the accu- racy of existing neural and search-based regex synthesizers on benchmarks with only positive examples

With the rise of software-as-a-service and microservice architectures, RESTful APIs are now ubiquitous in mobile and web applications. A service can have tens or hundreds of API methods, making it a challenge for programmers to find the right combination of methods to solve their task. We present APIphany, a component-based synthesizer for programs that compose calls to RESTful APIs. The main innovation behind APIphany is the use of precise semantic types, both to specify user intent and to direct the search. APIphany contributes three novel mechanisms to overcome challenges in adapting component-based synthesis to the REST domain: (1) a type inference algorithm for augmenting REST specifications with semantic types; (2) an efficient synthesis technique for “wrangling” semi-structured data, which is commonly required in working with RESTful APIs; and (3) a new form of simulated execution to avoid executing APIs calls during synthesis. We evaluate APIphany on three real-world APIs and 32 tasks extracted from GitHub repositories and StackOverflow. In our experiments, APIphany found correct solutions to 29 tasks, with 23 of them reported among top ten synthesis results.

One vision for program synthesis, and specifically for programming by example (PBE), is an interactive programmer's assistant, integrated into the development environment. To make program synthesis practical for interactive use, prior work on Small-Step Live PBE has proposed to limit the scope of synthesis to small code snippets, and enable the users to provide local specifications for those snippets. This paradigm, however, does not work well in the presence of loops. We present LooPy, a synthesizer integrated into a live programming environment, which extends Small-Step Live PBE to work inside loops and scales it up to synthesize larger code snippets, while remaining fast enough for interactive use. To allow users to effectively provide examples at various loop iterations, even when the loop body is incomplete, LooPy makes use of live execution , a technique that leverages the programmer as an oracle to step over incomplete parts of the loop. To enable synthesis of loop bodies at interactive speeds, LooPy introduces Intermediate State Graph , a new data structure, which compactly represents a large space of code snippets composed of multiple assignment statements and conditionals. We evaluate LooPy empirically using benchmarks from competitive programming and previous synthesizers, and show that itmore »can solve a wide variety of synthesis tasks at interactive speeds. We also perform a small qualitative user study which shows that LooPy's block-level specifications are easy for programmers to provide.« less

Automated deductive program synthesis promises to generate executable programs from concise specifications, along with proofs of correctness that can be independently verified using third-party tools. However, an attempt to exercise this promise using existing proof-certification frameworks reveals significant discrepancies in how proof derivations are structured for two different purposes: program synthesis and program verification. These discrepancies make it difficult to use certified verifiers to validate synthesis results, forcing one to write an ad-hoc translation procedure from synthesis proofs to correctness proofs for each verification backend. In this work, we address this challenge in the context of the synthesis and verification of heap-manipulating programs. We present a technique for principled translation of deductive synthesis derivations (a.k.a. source proofs) into deductive target proofs about the synthesised programs in the logics of interactive program verifiers. We showcase our technique by implementing three different certifiers for programs generated via SuSLik, a Separation Logic-based tool for automated synthesis of programs with pointers, in foundational verification frameworks embedded in Coq: Hoare Type Theory (HTT), Iris, and Verified Software Toolchain (VST), producing concise and efficient machine-checkable proofs for characteristic synthesis benchmarks.

Program synthesis promises to help software developers with everyday tasks by generating code snippets automatically from input-output examples and other high-level specifications. The conventional wisdom is that a synthesizer must always satisfy the specification exactly. We conjecture that this all-or-nothing paradigm stands in the way of adopting program synthesis as a developer tool: in practice, the user-written specification often contains errors or is simply too hard for the synthesizer to solve within a reasonable time; in these cases, the user is left with a single over-fitted result or, more often than not, no result at all. In this paper we propose a new program synthesis paradigm we call best-effort program synthesis, where the synthesizer returns a ranked list of partially-valid results, i.e. programs that satisfy some part of the specification. To support this paradigm, we develop best-effort enumeration, a new synthesis algorithm that extends a popular program enumeration technique with the ability to accumulate and return multiple partially-valid results with minimal overhead. We implement this algorithm in a tool called BESTER, and evaluate it on 79 synthesis benchmarks from the literature. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, our evaluation shows that BESTER returns useful results even when the specification is flawedmore »or too hard: i) for all benchmarks with an error in the specification, the top three BESTER results contain the correct solution, and ii) for most hard benchmarks, the top three results contain non-trivial fragments of the correct solution. We also performed an exploratory user study, which confirms our intuition that partially-valid results are useful: the study shows that programmers use the output of the synthesizer for comprehension and often incorporate it into their solutions.« less