Shedding Light in Task Decomposition in Program Synthesis: The Driving Force of the Synthesizer Model

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zenkner, Janis, Sesterhenn, Tobias, Bartelt, Christian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915206179848192
author Zenkner, Janis
Sesterhenn, Tobias
Bartelt, Christian
author_facet Zenkner, Janis
Sesterhenn, Tobias
Bartelt, Christian
contents Task decomposition is a fundamental mechanism in program synthesis, enabling complex problems to be broken down into manageable subtasks. ExeDec, a state-of-the-art program synthesis framework, employs this approach by combining a Subgoal Model for decomposition and a Synthesizer Model for program generation to facilitate compositional generalization. In this work, we develop REGISM, an adaptation of ExeDec that removes decomposition guidance and relies solely on iterative execution-driven synthesis. By comparing these two exemplary approaches-ExeDec, which leverages task decomposition, and REGISM, which does not-we investigate the interplay between task decomposition and program generation. Our findings indicate that ExeDec exhibits significant advantages in length generalization and concept composition tasks, likely due to its explicit decomposition strategies. At the same time, REGISM frequently matches or surpasses ExeDec's performance across various scenarios, with its solutions often aligning more closely with ground truth decompositions. These observations highlight the importance of repeated execution-guided synthesis in driving task-solving performance, even within frameworks that incorporate explicit decomposition strategies. Our analysis suggests that task decomposition approaches like ExeDec hold significant potential for advancing program synthesis, though further work is needed to clarify when and why these strategies are most effective.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Shedding Light in Task Decomposition in Program Synthesis: The Driving Force of the Synthesizer Model
Zenkner, Janis
Sesterhenn, Tobias
Bartelt, Christian
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Programming Languages
Task decomposition is a fundamental mechanism in program synthesis, enabling complex problems to be broken down into manageable subtasks. ExeDec, a state-of-the-art program synthesis framework, employs this approach by combining a Subgoal Model for decomposition and a Synthesizer Model for program generation to facilitate compositional generalization. In this work, we develop REGISM, an adaptation of ExeDec that removes decomposition guidance and relies solely on iterative execution-driven synthesis. By comparing these two exemplary approaches-ExeDec, which leverages task decomposition, and REGISM, which does not-we investigate the interplay between task decomposition and program generation. Our findings indicate that ExeDec exhibits significant advantages in length generalization and concept composition tasks, likely due to its explicit decomposition strategies. At the same time, REGISM frequently matches or surpasses ExeDec's performance across various scenarios, with its solutions often aligning more closely with ground truth decompositions. These observations highlight the importance of repeated execution-guided synthesis in driving task-solving performance, even within frameworks that incorporate explicit decomposition strategies. Our analysis suggests that task decomposition approaches like ExeDec hold significant potential for advancing program synthesis, though further work is needed to clarify when and why these strategies are most effective.
title Shedding Light in Task Decomposition in Program Synthesis: The Driving Force of the Synthesizer Model
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08738