Creating Synthetic Datasets via Evolution for Neural Program Synthesis

Abstract: Program synthesis is the task of automatically generating a program consistent with a given specification. A natural way to specify programs is to provide examples of desired input-output behavior, and many current program synthesis approaches have achieved impressive results after training on randomly generated input-output examples. However, recent work has discovered that some of these approaches generalize poorly to data distributions different from that of the randomly generated examples. We show that this problem applies to other state-of-the-art approaches as well and that current methods to counteract this problem are insufficient. We then propose a new, adversarial approach to control the bias of synthetic data distributions and show that it outperforms current approaches.