Online Prompt Selection for Program Synthesis

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Yixuan, Frampton, Lewis, Mora, Federico, Polgreen, Elizabeth
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Yixuan
Frampton, Lewis
Mora, Federico
Polgreen, Elizabeth
author_facet Li, Yixuan
Frampton, Lewis
Mora, Federico
Polgreen, Elizabeth
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in the domain of program synthesis. This level of performance is not, however, universal across all tasks, all LLMs and all prompting styles. There are many areas where one LLM dominates, one prompting style dominates, or where calling a symbolic solver is a better choice than an LLM. A key challenge for the user then, is to identify not only when an LLM is the right choice of solver, and the appropriate LLM to call for a given synthesis task, but also the right way to call it. A non-expert user who makes the wrong choice, incurs a cost both in terms of results (number of tasks solved, and the time it takes to solve them) and financial cost, if using a closed-source language model via a commercial API. We frame this choice as an online learning problem. We use a multi-armed bandit algorithm to select which symbolic solver, or LLM and prompt combination to deploy in order to maximize a given reward function (which may prioritize solving time, number of synthesis tasks solved, or financial cost of solving). We implement an instance of this approach, called CYANEA, and evaluate it on synthesis queries from the literature in ranking function synthesis, from the syntax-guided synthesis competition, and fresh, unseen queries generated from SMT problems. CYANEA solves 37.2% more queries than the best single solver and achieves results within 4% of the virtual best solver.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_05247
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Prompt Selection for Program Synthesis
Li, Yixuan
Frampton, Lewis
Mora, Federico
Polgreen, Elizabeth
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in the domain of program synthesis. This level of performance is not, however, universal across all tasks, all LLMs and all prompting styles. There are many areas where one LLM dominates, one prompting style dominates, or where calling a symbolic solver is a better choice than an LLM. A key challenge for the user then, is to identify not only when an LLM is the right choice of solver, and the appropriate LLM to call for a given synthesis task, but also the right way to call it. A non-expert user who makes the wrong choice, incurs a cost both in terms of results (number of tasks solved, and the time it takes to solve them) and financial cost, if using a closed-source language model via a commercial API. We frame this choice as an online learning problem. We use a multi-armed bandit algorithm to select which symbolic solver, or LLM and prompt combination to deploy in order to maximize a given reward function (which may prioritize solving time, number of synthesis tasks solved, or financial cost of solving). We implement an instance of this approach, called CYANEA, and evaluate it on synthesis queries from the literature in ranking function synthesis, from the syntax-guided synthesis competition, and fresh, unseen queries generated from SMT problems. CYANEA solves 37.2% more queries than the best single solver and achieves results within 4% of the virtual best solver.
title Online Prompt Selection for Program Synthesis
topic Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05247