Scaling Enumerative Program Synthesis via Divide and Conquer

Abstract

Given a semantic constraint specified by a logical formula, and a syntactic constraint specified by a context-free grammar, the Syntax-Guided Synthesis (SyGuS) problem is to find an expression that satisfies both the syntactic and semantic constraints. An enumerative approach to solve this problem is to systematically generate all expressions from the syntactic space with some pruning, and has proved to be surprisingly competitive in the newly started competition of SyGuS solvers. It performs well on small to medium sized benchmarks, produces succinct expressions, and has the ability to generalize from input-output examples. However, its performance degrades drastically with the size of the smallest solution. To overcome this limitation, in this paper we propose an alternative approach to solve SyGuS instances.