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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Top-Down Synthesis for Library Learning

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

This thesis introduces corpus-guided top-down synthesis as a mechanism for synthesizing library functions that capture common functionality from a corpus of programs in a domain specific language (DSL). The algorithm builds abstractions directly from initial DSL primitives, using syntactic pattern matching of intermediate abstractions to intelligently prune the search space and guide the algorithm towards abstractions that maximally capture shared structures in the corpus. We present an implementation of the approach in a tool called Stitch and evaluate it against the state-of-the-art deductive library learning algorithm from DreamCoder. Our evaluation shows that Stitch is 3-4 orders of magnitude faster and uses 2 orders of magnitude less memory while maintaining comparable or better library quality (as measured by compressivity). We also demonstrate Stitch’s scalability on corpora containing hundreds of complex programs that are intractable with prior deductive approaches and show empirically that it is robust to terminating the search procedure early—further allowing it to scale to challenging datasets by means of early stopping. We publish the code, the documentation, a tutorial, and a Python library for interfacing with our for our Rust implementation of Stitch. Tutorial & Documentation (Python Library): https://stitch-bindings.read thedocs.io/en/stable/intro/tutorial.html Rust Implementation: https://github.com/mlb2251/stitch Artifact (Awarded: Reusable): https://github.com/mlb2251/stitch-artifact

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2023

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Bowers, Matthew L.
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Solar-Lezama, Armando

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright retained by author(s)

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151374
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151374

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Bowers, Matthew L.. Top-Down Synthesis for Library Learning. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151374