Write, Execute, Assess: Program Synthesis with a REPL

Understand

We present a neural program synthesis approach integrating components which write, execute, and assess code to navigate the search space of possible programs.

• We equip the search process with an interpreter or a read-eval-print-loop (REPL), which immediately executes partially written programs, exposing their semantics.
• The REPL addresses a basic challenge of program synthesis: tiny changes in syntax can lead to huge changes in semantics.
• We train a pair of models, a policy that proposes the new piece of code to write, and a value function that assesses the prospects of the code written so-far.