Efficient Synthesis with Probabilistic Constraints

Abstract

We consider the problem of synthesizing a program given a probabilistic specification of its desired behavior. Specifically, we study the recent paradigm of distribution-guided inductive synthesis (digits), which iteratively calls a synthesizer on finite sample sets from a given distribution. We make theoretical and algorithmic contributions: (i) We prove the surprising result that digits only requires a polynomial number of synthesizer calls in the size of the sample set, despite its ostensibly exponential behavior. (ii) We present a property-directed version of digits that further reduces the number of synthesizer calls, drastically improving synthesis performance on a range of benchmarks.