Deep Learning for Program Synthesis

Despite the many advances in computing over the past decades, the actual process of writing computer software has not fundamentally changed — a programmer must manually code the exact algorithmic logic of a program in a step-by-step manner using a specialized programming language. Although programming languages have become much more user-friendly over the years, learning how to program is still a major endeavor that most computer users have not undertaken.

In a recent paper, we report our latest work in deep learning for program synthesis, where deep neural networks learn how to generate computer programs based on a user’s intent. The user simply provides a few input/output (I/O) examples to specify the desired program behavior, and the system uses these to generate a corresponding program.