Programming-by-example Research Articles (Page 1)

Data transformation is a laborious and time-consuming task for analysts. Programming by example (PBE) is a technique that can simplify this difficult task for data analysts by automatically generating programs for data transformation. Most of the previously proposed PBE methods are based on search algorithms, but recent improvements in machine learning (ML) have led to its application in PBE research. For example, RobustFill was proposed as an ML-based PBE method for string transformation by using long short-term memory (LSTM) as the sequential encoder–decoder model. However, an ML-based PBE method has not been developed for tabular transformations, which are used frequently in data analysis. Thus, in the present study, we propose an ML-based PBE method for tabular transformations. First, we consider the features of tabular transformations, which are more complex and data intensive than string transformations, and propose a new ML-based PBE method using the state-of-the-art Transformer sequential encoder–decoder model. To our knowledge, this is the first ML-based PBE method for tabular transformations. We also propose two decoding methods comprising multistep beam search and program validation-beam search, which are optimized for program generation, and thus generate correct programs with higher accuracy. Our evaluation results demonstrated that the Transformer-based PBE model performed much better than LSTM-based PBE when applied to tabular transformations. Furthermore, the Transformer-based model with the proposed decoding method performed better than the conventional PBE model using the search-based method.

One vision for program synthesis, and specifically for programming by example (PBE), is an interactive programmer's assistant, integrated into the development environment. To make program synthesis practical for interactive use, prior work on Small-Step Live PBE has proposed to limit the scope of synthesis to small code snippets, and enable the users to provide local specifications for those snippets. This paradigm, however, does not work well in the presence of loops. We present LooPy, a synthesizer integrated into a live programming environment, which extends Small-Step Live PBE to work inside loops and scales it up to synthesize larger code snippets, while remaining fast enough for interactive use. To allow users to effectively provide examples at various loop iterations, even when the loop body is incomplete, LooPy makes use of live execution , a technique that leverages the programmer as an oracle to step over incomplete parts of the loop. To enable synthesis of loop bodies at interactive speeds, LooPy introduces Intermediate State Graph , a new data structure, which compactly represents a large space of code snippets composed of multiple assignment statements and conditionals. We evaluate LooPy empirically using benchmarks from competitive programming and previous synthesizers, and show that it can solve a wide variety of synthesis tasks at interactive speeds. We also perform a small qualitative user study which shows that LooPy's block-level specifications are easy for programmers to provide.