NetSyn: Neural Evolutionary Technique to Synthesize Programs

08/22/2019

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by   Shantanu Mandal, et al.

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Program synthesis using inputs and outputs is a fundamental problem in computer science. Towards that end, we present a framework, called NetSyn, that synthesizes programs using an evolutionary algorithm. NetSyn makes several novel contributions. First, NetSyn uses neural networks as a fitness function. This addresses the principal challenge of evolutionary algorithm: how to design the most effective fitness function. Second, NetSyn combines an evolutionary algorithm with neighborhood search to expedite the convergence process. Third, NetSyn can support a variety of neural network fitness functions uniformly. We evaluated NetSyn to generate programs in a list-based domain specific language. We compared the proposed approach against a state-of-the-art approach to show that NetSyn performs better in synthesizing programs.