Learning Libraries of Subroutines for Neurally-Guided Bayesian Program Induction

Kevin Ellis, Lucas Morales, Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Armando Solar-Lezama, Josh Tenenbaum

Abstract: Successful approaches to program induction require a hand-engineered domain-specific language (DSL), constraining the space of allowed programs and imparting prior knowledge of the domain. We contribute a program induction algorithm that learns a DSL while jointly training a neural network to efficiently search for programs in the learned DSL. We use our model to synthesize functions on lists, edit text, and solve symbolic regression problems, showing how the model learns a domain-specific library of program components for expressing solutions to problems in the domain.