Program Synthesis from Visual Specification
Abstract
Program synthesis is the process of automatically translating a specification into computer code. Traditional synthesis settings require a formal, precise specification. Motivated by computer education applications where a student learns to code simple turtle-style drawing programs, we study a novel synthesis setting where only a noisy user-intention drawing is specified. This allows students to sketch their intended output, optionally together with their own incomplete program, to automatically produce a completed program. We formulate this synthesis problem as search in the space of programs, with the score of a state being the Hausdorff distance between the program output and the user drawing. We compare several search algorithms on a corpus consisting of real user drawings and the corresponding programs, and demonstrate that our algorithms can synthesize programs optimally satisfying the specification.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.00938,
title = {Program Synthesis from Visual Specification},
author = {Evan Hernandez and Ara Vartanian and Xiaojin Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.00938},
year = {2018}
}