Can humans teach machines to code?
Human-Computer Interaction
2025-02-18 v2 Machine Learning
Abstract
The goal of inductive program synthesis is for a machine to automatically generate a program from user-supplied examples. A key underlying assumption is that humans can provide sufficient examples to teach a concept to a machine. To evaluate the validity of this assumption, we conduct a study where human participants provide examples for six programming concepts, such as finding the maximum element of a list. We evaluate the generalisation performance of five program synthesis systems trained on input-output examples (i) from non-expert humans, (ii) from a human expert, and (iii) randomly sampled. Our results suggest that non-experts typically do not provide sufficient examples for a program synthesis system to learn an accurate program.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2404.19397,
title = {Can humans teach machines to code?},
author = {Céline Hocquette and Johannes Langer and Andrew Cropper and Ute Schmid},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19397},
year = {2025}
}