
Show HN: Deep Learning for Program Synthesis - suryabhupa
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/deep-learning-program-synthesis/?wt.mc_id=MCR_378116_FB1
======
suryabhupa
One of the authors here -- would love to answer any questions about the work!
:)

~~~
lostmsu
Are you going to publish the source code for reproduction?

~~~
suryabhupa
Eventually, yes.

------
pxnii
As much as I'd love a program to infer my intent to a specific language, I
wouldn't think it would help me as much. In my everyday work, most of the time
I need to handle edge cases, which need specific instructions for specific
scenarios. Once the logic is figured out, the writing part is just minimal.

Machine learning/AI can learn from common cases to infer logic from intent.
For such special cases, it may not be as common and need instructions. By
then, I may as well write code by hand.

Edit: grammar

------
timtadh
@suryabhupa How similar is this work to the Grammatical Inference field? There
has been a lot of work over the years in specification inference which feels
similar. Many of the studies in specification inference learn automata
representations of object interactions. I know there have been other
application grammatical inference in Software Engineering as well.

~~~
lmeyerov
Program synthesis is grammatical inference grown up, and statistical
approaches are being experimented w/ for modern synthesis just as they were
for the genetic programming & grammatical inference era. (I believe even now
at the SAT solver level today.)

At a quick skim, this seems fun more as (1) an experience report of jumping on
the DNN train instead of other ML algs and (2) more intriguing to me, the
training formulation (irrespective of neural nets). Dawn Song's recent
explorations here also sounded pretty interesting in terms of bridging logical
synthesis of general programs with statistical..

~~~
mldeeplearn
Grammatical inference learns a grammar from a set of examples, where here it
seems the paper is learning a program (a derivation in the grammar) from
examples.

Which Dawn Song paper are you talking about here? I think among all the recent
approaches proposed recently on neural program induction, this is the first
one that is end-to-end trained and learns only from input-output examples
without any hacks!

------
philip142au
I would like a web API which when given training examples it generates the
program in a given language such as Java

~~~
suryabhupa
That's one manifestation of this kind of research being used in real life by
programmers around the world. :)

------
mldeeplearn
@suryabhupa is this going to be available to try out in Excel?

~~~
suryabhupa
There are talks of incorporating this into Excel at some point in the future,
but it may take a _while_ before it can be fully productionized.

~~~
mldeeplearn
looking forward to playing with it!

------
iandanforth
Do you ever mess with the system and feed it crazy to see what it does?

aardvark

gorilla

orangutan

elephant

 _select list and extend_

~~~
suryabhupa
That would be pretty cool to see what it learns, but I don't think we've tried
that :P

