Is Programming by Example solved by LLMs?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Wen-Ding, Ellis, Kevin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Li, Wen-Ding
Ellis, Kevin
author_facet Li, Wen-Ding
Ellis, Kevin
contents Programming-by-Examples (PBE) aims to generate an algorithm from input-output examples. Such systems are practically and theoretically important: from an end-user perspective, they are deployed to millions of people, and from an AI perspective, PBE corresponds to a very general form of few-shot inductive inference. Given the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code-generation tasks, we investigate here the extent to which LLMs can be said to have "solved" PBE. We experiment on classic domains such as lists and strings, and an uncommon graphics programming domain not well represented in typical pretraining data. We find that pretrained models are not effective at PBE, but that they can be fine-tuned for much higher performance, provided the test problems are in-distribution. We analyze empirically what causes these models to succeed and fail, and take steps toward understanding how to achieve better out-of-distribution generalization. Collectively these results suggest that LLMs make strong progress toward solving the typical suite of PBE tasks, potentially increasing the flexibility and applicability of PBE systems, while also identifying ways in which LLMs still fall short.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_08316
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Programming by Example solved by LLMs?
Li, Wen-Ding
Ellis, Kevin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
Programming-by-Examples (PBE) aims to generate an algorithm from input-output examples. Such systems are practically and theoretically important: from an end-user perspective, they are deployed to millions of people, and from an AI perspective, PBE corresponds to a very general form of few-shot inductive inference. Given the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code-generation tasks, we investigate here the extent to which LLMs can be said to have "solved" PBE. We experiment on classic domains such as lists and strings, and an uncommon graphics programming domain not well represented in typical pretraining data. We find that pretrained models are not effective at PBE, but that they can be fine-tuned for much higher performance, provided the test problems are in-distribution. We analyze empirically what causes these models to succeed and fail, and take steps toward understanding how to achieve better out-of-distribution generalization. Collectively these results suggest that LLMs make strong progress toward solving the typical suite of PBE tasks, potentially increasing the flexibility and applicability of PBE systems, while also identifying ways in which LLMs still fall short.
title Is Programming by Example solved by LLMs?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08316