Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016)
Kevin Ellis, Armando Solar-Lezama, Josh Tenenbaum
Towards learning programs from data, we introduce the problem of sampling programs from posterior distributions conditioned on that data. Within this setting, we propose an algorithm that uses a symbolic solver to efficiently sample programs. The proposal combines constraint-based program synthesis with sampling via random parity constraints. We give theoretical guarantees on how well the samples approximate the true posterior, and have empirical results showing the algorithm is efficient in practice, evaluating our approach on 22 program learning problems in the domains of text editing and computer-aided programming.