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DeepCoder: Learning to Write Programs (arxiv.org)
3 points by ochang on Nov 30, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A learning system reads input-output examples, guesses clues about the hidden program, and steers a search for code that fits. It made the search about ten times faster than unguided search and a word-by-word predictor, solving problems as hard as the easiest competition tasks.

Abstract

We develop a first line of attack for solving programming competition-style problems from input-output examples using deep learning. The approach is to train a neural network to predict properties of the program that generated the outputs from the inputs. We use the neural network's predictions to augment search techniques from the programming languages community, including enumerative search and an SMT-based solver. Empirically, we show that our approach leads to an order of magnitude speedup over the strong non-augmented baselines and a Recurrent Neural Network approach, and that we are able to solve problems of difficulty comparable to the simplest problems on programming competition websites.

Matej Balog, Alexander L. Gaunt, Marc Brockschmidt, Sebastian Nowozin, Daniel Tarlow
arXiv:1611.01989 · cs.LG · submitted Nov 7, 2016 · updated Mar 8, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Submitted to ICLR 2017

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Also discussed: Feb 2017 (183 points, 54 comments)