Differentiable Functional Program Interpreters
Programming by Example (PBE) is the task of inducing computer programs from input output examples. It can be seen as a type of machine learning where the hypothesis space is the set of legal programs in some programming language. Recent work on differentiable interpreters relaxes the discrete space of programs into a continuous space so that search over programs can be performed using gradient based optimization. While conceptually powerful, so far differentiable interpreter based program synthesis has only been capable of solving very simple problems. In this work, we study modeling choices that arise when constructing a differentiable programming language and their impact on the success of synthesis. The main motivation for the modeling choices comes from functional programming: we study the effect of memory allocation schemes, immutable data, type systems, and built in control flow structures. Empirically we show that incorporating functional programming ideas into differentiable programming languages allows us to learn much more complex programs than is possible with existing differentiable languages.