research-article

At the end of synthesis: narrowing program candidates

Authors:

Sebastian Elbaum,

Kathryn T. StoleeAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE-NIER '17: Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results Track

Pages 19 - 22

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-NIER.2017.7

Published: 20 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Program synthesis is succeeding in supporting the generation of programs within increasingly complex domains. The use of weaker specifications, such as those consisting of input/output examples or test cases, has helped to fuel the success of program synthesis by lowering adoption barriers. Yet, employing weaker specifications has the side effect of generating a potentially large number of candidate programs. This was not a problem for simpler and smaller program domains, but it is becoming evident that differentiating among many synthesized programs is a challenge that needs addressing. We sketch an approach to mitigate this challenge, requiring less effort from the user while automatically identifying inputs that can differentiate clusters of synthesized programs. The approach has the potential to more cost-effectively narrow the space of candidate programs in a range of synthesis applications.

References

[1]

E. Kitzelmann, Inductive Programming: A Survey of Program Synthesis Techniques. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010, pp. 50--73.

[2]

W. R. Harris and S. Gulwani, "Spreadsheet table transformations from examples," in Proceedings of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. ACM, 2011, pp. 317--328.

Digital Library

[3]

S. Gulwani, "Automating string processing in spreadsheets using input-output examples," in Proceedings of the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. ACM, 2011, pp. 317--330.

Digital Library

[4]

S. Mechtaev, J. Yi, and A. Roychoudhury, "Angelix: Scalable multiline program patch synthesis via symbolic analysis," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering. ACM, 2016, pp. 691--701.

Digital Library

[5]

S. Mechtaev, "Directfix: Looking for simple program repairs," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1. IEEE, 2015, pp. 448--458.

Digital Library

[6]

F. Long and M. Rinard, "Automatic patch generation by learning correct code," SIGPLAN Not., vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 298--312, Jan. 2016.

Digital Library

[7]

R. Singh and S. Gulwani, "Synthesizing number transformations from input-output examples," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Aided Verification. Springer-Verlag, 2012, pp. 634--651.

Digital Library

[8]

A. Leung, J. Sarracino, and S. Lerner, "Interactive parser synthesis by example," SIGPLAN Not., vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 565--574, Jun. 2015.

Digital Library

[9]

A. Solar-Lezama, R. Rabbah, R. Bodík, and K. Ebcioğlu, "Programming by sketching for bit-streaming programs," SIGPLAN Not., vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 281--294, Jun. 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

J. Galenson, P. Reames, R. Bodik, B. Hartmann, and K. Sen, "Codehint: Dynamic and interactive synthesis of code snippets," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering. ACM, 2014, pp. 653--663.

Digital Library

[11]

K. T. Stolee, S. Elbaum, and D. Dobos, "Solving the search for source code," ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 26:1--26:45, May 2014.

Digital Library

[12]

P. J. Guo, S. Kandel, J. M. Hellerstein, and J. Heer, "Proactive wrangling: Mixed-initiative end-user programming of data transformation scripts," in Proceedings of the Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. ACM, 2011, pp. 65--74.

Digital Library

[13]

M. Mayer, G. Soares, M. Grechkin, V. Le, M. Marron, O. Polozov, R. Singh, B. Zorn, and S. Gulwani, "User interaction models for disambiguation in programming by example," in Proceedings of the Symposium on User Interface Software; Technology. ACM, 2015, pp. 291--301.

Digital Library

[14]

K. T. Stolee, S. G. Elbaum, and M. B. Dwyer, "Code search with input/output queries: Generalizing, ranking, and assessment," Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 116, pp. 35--48, 2016.

Digital Library

[15]

S. Jha, S. Gulwani, S. A. Seshia, and A. Tiwari, "Oracle-guided component-based program synthesis," in International Conference on Software Engineering, vol. 1. IEEE, 2010, pp. 215--224.

Digital Library

Cited By

Brancas RTerra-Neves MVentura MManquinho VMartins R(2024)Towards Reliable SQL Synthesis: Fuzzing-Based Evaluation and DisambiguationFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-57259-3_11(232-254)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-57259-3_11
Le Goues CPradel MRoychoudhury A(2019)Automated program repairCommunications of the ACM10.1145/331816262:12(56-65)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318162
Gao XMechtaev SRoychoudhury AZhang DMøller A(2019)Crash-avoiding program repairProceedings of the 28th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3293882.3330558(8-18)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3293882.3330558
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Can reactive synthesis and syntax-guided synthesis be friends?
SPLASH Companion 2021: Companion Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

While reactive synthesis and syntax-guided synthesis (SyGuS) have seen enormous progress in recent years, combining the two approaches has remained a challenge. In this work, we present the synthesis of reactive programs from Temporal Stream Logic ...
Optimizing synthesis with metasketches
POPL '16

Many advanced programming tools---for both end-users and expert developers---rely on program synthesis to automatically generate implementations from high-level specifications. These tools often need to employ tricky, custom-built synthesis algorithms ...
Can reactive synthesis and syntax-guided synthesis be friends?
PLDI 2022: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

While reactive synthesis and syntax-guided synthesis (SyGuS) have seen enormous progress in recent years, combining the two approaches has remained a challenge. In this work, we present the synthesis of reactive programs from Temporal Stream Logic ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE-NIER '17: Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results Track

May 2017

75 pages

ISBN:9781538626757

Program Chairs:
Cristian Cadar
Imperial College London
,
Lin Tan
University of Waterloo

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society
SADIO: SADIO

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 20 May 2017

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICSE '17

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS
SADIO

ICSE '17: 39th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 20 - 28, 2017

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
71
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 12 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Brancas RTerra-Neves MVentura MManquinho VMartins R(2024)Towards Reliable SQL Synthesis: Fuzzing-Based Evaluation and DisambiguationFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-57259-3_11(232-254)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-57259-3_11
Le Goues CPradel MRoychoudhury A(2019)Automated program repairCommunications of the ACM10.1145/331816262:12(56-65)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318162
Gao XMechtaev SRoychoudhury AZhang DMøller A(2019)Crash-avoiding program repairProceedings of the 28th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3293882.3330558(8-18)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3293882.3330558
Monperrus MShihab EWagner S(2019)Explainable software bot contributionsProceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering10.1109/BotSE.2019.00010(12-15)Online publication date: 27-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/BotSE.2019.00010
Mechtaev SGao XTan SRoychoudhury A(2018)Test-Equivalence Analysis for Automatic Patch GenerationACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/324198027:4(1-37)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241980

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents