Can LLMs Perform Synthesis?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Egolf, Derek, Zhou, Yuhao, Tripakis, Stavros
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Egolf, Derek
Zhou, Yuhao
Tripakis, Stavros
author_facet Egolf, Derek
Zhou, Yuhao
Tripakis, Stavros
contents How do LLMs compare with symbolic tools on program synthesis tasks? We investigate this question on several synthesis domains: LTL reactive synthesis, syntax-guided synthesis, distributed protocol synthesis, and recursive function synthesis. For each domain, we choose a state-of-the-art symbolic tool and compare it to an open-source, 32 billion parameter version of the Qwen LLM and the proprietary, frontier LLM GPT-5. We couple Qwen with a symbolic verifier and run it repeatedly until it either produces a solution that passes the verifier, or until there is a timeout, for each benchmark. We run GPT-5 once per benchmark and verify the generated output. In all domains, the symbolic tools solve more benchmarks than Qwen and either outperform or are about on par with GPT-5. In terms of execution time, the symbolic tools outperform GPT-5 in all domains, and either outperform or are very close to Qwen, despite the fact that the LLMs are run on significantly more powerful hardware.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20264
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can LLMs Perform Synthesis?
Egolf, Derek
Zhou, Yuhao
Tripakis, Stavros
Programming Languages
Logic in Computer Science
How do LLMs compare with symbolic tools on program synthesis tasks? We investigate this question on several synthesis domains: LTL reactive synthesis, syntax-guided synthesis, distributed protocol synthesis, and recursive function synthesis. For each domain, we choose a state-of-the-art symbolic tool and compare it to an open-source, 32 billion parameter version of the Qwen LLM and the proprietary, frontier LLM GPT-5. We couple Qwen with a symbolic verifier and run it repeatedly until it either produces a solution that passes the verifier, or until there is a timeout, for each benchmark. We run GPT-5 once per benchmark and verify the generated output. In all domains, the symbolic tools solve more benchmarks than Qwen and either outperform or are about on par with GPT-5. In terms of execution time, the symbolic tools outperform GPT-5 in all domains, and either outperform or are very close to Qwen, despite the fact that the LLMs are run on significantly more powerful hardware.
title Can LLMs Perform Synthesis?
topic Programming Languages
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20264