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Main Authors: Dong, Rui, Wu, Qingyue, Ding, Danny, Guo, Zheng, Ji, Ruyi, Wang, Xinyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13290
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author Dong, Rui
Wu, Qingyue
Ding, Danny
Guo, Zheng
Ji, Ruyi
Wang, Xinyu
author_facet Dong, Rui
Wu, Qingyue
Ding, Danny
Guo, Zheng
Ji, Ruyi
Wang, Xinyu
contents Abstract semantics has proven to be instrumental for accelerating search-based program synthesis, by enabling the sound pruning of a set of incorrect programs (without enumerating them). One may expect faster synthesis with increasingly finer-grained abstract semantics. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, this is not the case, yet. The reason is because, as abstraction granularity increases -- while fewer programs are enumerated -- pruning becomes more costly. This imposes a fundamental limit on the overall synthesis performance, which we aim to address in this work. Our key idea is to introduce an offline presynthesis phase, which consists of two steps. Given a DSL with abstract semantics, the first semantics modeling step constructs a tree automaton A for a space of inputs -- such that, for any program P and for any considered input I, A has a run that corresponds to P's execution on I under abstract semantics. Then, the second step builds an oracle O for A. This O enables fast pruning during synthesis, by allowing us to efficiently find exactly those DSL programs that satisfy a given input-output example under abstract semantics. We have implemented this presynthesis-based synthesis paradigm in a framework, Foresighter. On top of it, we have developed three instantiations for SQL, string transformation, and matrix manipulation. All of them significantly outperform prior work in the respective domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13290
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Presynthesis: Towards Scaling Up Program Synthesis with Finer-Grained Abstract Semantics
Dong, Rui
Wu, Qingyue
Ding, Danny
Guo, Zheng
Ji, Ruyi
Wang, Xinyu
Programming Languages
Abstract semantics has proven to be instrumental for accelerating search-based program synthesis, by enabling the sound pruning of a set of incorrect programs (without enumerating them). One may expect faster synthesis with increasingly finer-grained abstract semantics. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, this is not the case, yet. The reason is because, as abstraction granularity increases -- while fewer programs are enumerated -- pruning becomes more costly. This imposes a fundamental limit on the overall synthesis performance, which we aim to address in this work. Our key idea is to introduce an offline presynthesis phase, which consists of two steps. Given a DSL with abstract semantics, the first semantics modeling step constructs a tree automaton A for a space of inputs -- such that, for any program P and for any considered input I, A has a run that corresponds to P's execution on I under abstract semantics. Then, the second step builds an oracle O for A. This O enables fast pruning during synthesis, by allowing us to efficiently find exactly those DSL programs that satisfy a given input-output example under abstract semantics. We have implemented this presynthesis-based synthesis paradigm in a framework, Foresighter. On top of it, we have developed three instantiations for SQL, string transformation, and matrix manipulation. All of them significantly outperform prior work in the respective domains.
title Presynthesis: Towards Scaling Up Program Synthesis with Finer-Grained Abstract Semantics
topic Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13290