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arXiv · 1806.00938

Program Synthesis from Visual Specification

Evan Hernandez·Ara Vartanian·Xiaojin Zhu
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Abstract

Program synthesis is the process of automatically translating a specification into computer code. Traditional synthesis settings require a formal, precise specification. Motivated by computer education applications where a student learns to code simple turtle-style drawing programs, we study a novel synthesis setting where only a noisy user-intention drawing is specified. This allows students to sketch their intended output, optionally together with their own incomplete program, to automatically produce a completed program. We formulate this synthesis problem as search in the space of programs, with the score of a state being the Hausdorff distance between the program output and the user drawing. We compare several search algorithms on a corpus consisting of real user drawings and the corresponding programs, and demonstrate that our algorithms can synthesize programs optimally satisfying the specification.

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Evan Hernandez, Ara Vartanian, Xiaojin Zhu. 2018-06-04. Program Synthesis from Visual Specification. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00938

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