Abstract Synthesis

Ndea

Go beyond the paper abstract to synthesize new ideas. AGI research lab Ndea presents the stories behind remarkable academic papers in the field of program synthesis.

  1. May 27

    Recursive Program Synthesis - Aws Albarghouthi

    Aws Albarghouthi, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discusses his paper “Recursive Program Synthesis”, which introduced Escher, an inductive synthesis algorithm for learning recursive programs from input-output examples.The project emerged from Albarghouthi’s early work in program verification and inductive proofs for recursive procedures. After he and fellow graduate student Zachary Kincaid developed initial ideas for synthesizing recursive programs, they cold-emailed Sumit Gulwani at Microsoft Research, whose feedback and collaboration helped shape the direction of the paper.In This Episode -- Recursive synthesis from examples- Escher’s forward and backward search- Goal graphs for partial programs- Components as reusable building blocks- Synthesis benchmarks and comparisons with Sketch- Quantum compiler synthesis- Qubit mapping and routing synthesis- Agent correctness and prompt injectionReferences -- Microsoft PROSE: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/prose/- SKETCH: https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/papers/Solar-Lezama09.pdf- Generating Compilers for Qubit Mapping and Routing: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10781- Synthesizing Quantum-Circuit Optimizers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09691- ‘Introduction to Neural Network Verification’ book: https://verifieddeeplearning.com/About the Paper -“Recursive Program Synthesis”Aws Albarghouthi, Sumit Gulwani, and Zachary KincaidComputer Aided Verification, CAV 2013The paper presents Escher, a synthesis algorithm that learns recursive procedures from input-output examples. Escher combines component-based enumeration, interactive example refinement, and a goal graph that helps assemble partial programs into complete recursive solutions.https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/recursive-program-synthesis/About the Guest -Aws Albarghouthi is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on program synthesis, formal verification, quantum computing systems, and the correctness of AI agents.https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~aws/Credits -Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, NdeaEditor: Alejandro Ramirezhttps://x.com/ndeahttps://x.com/bryanlandershttps://ndea.com

    56 min

  2. Apr 7

    DreamCoder's Wake-Sleep Library Learning - Kevin Ellis

    Kevin Ellis, Assistant Professor at Cornell University, discusses his influential paper “DreamCoder,” which presents a system that jointly learns reusable program abstractions and a neural search strategy through an iterative wake-sleep process. The work emerged from early efforts in library learning and a broader question about how humans accumulate concepts over time. Ellis reflects on the challenge of searching vast program spaces and how inspiration from cognitive processes, particularly dreaming and replay, led to a system that incrementally builds knowledge by reusing prior solutions. In This Episode - • Program synthesis beyond formal specifications • Natural language as executable programs • Library learning for compositional reuse • Wake-sleep cycles for program learning • Neural-guided search over program space • E-graph refactoring for abstraction discovery • Emergence of map and fold primitives • Probabilistic programs for uncertainty • World models beyond frame prediction • Program synthesis benchmarks References - • ARC-AGI-3: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/3 • ExoPredicator: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26255 • AutumnBench: https://www.basis.ai/blog/autumn-platform-2025/ About the Paper - “DreamCoder: bootstrapping inductive program synthesis with wake-sleep library learning” Kevin Ellis, Catherine Wong, Maxwell Nye, Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Lucas Morales, Luke Hewitt, Luc Cary, Armando Solar-Lezama, Joshua B. Tenenbaum PLDI 2021 (ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation) DreamCoder is a program synthesis system that learns both a library of reusable program components and a neural search policy by iteratively solving tasks and compressing solutions into abstractions. It alternates between solving problems (wake phase) and improving its internal representations via abstraction and dreaming phases, enabling more efficient search and generalization across domains. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453483.3454080 About the Guest - Kevin Ellis is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University working on program synthesis, neurosymbolic AI, and computational models of cognition. His research focuses on learning structured representations such as programs that capture compositional knowledge about the world. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ellisk/ Credits - • Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea • Editor: Alejandro Ramirez • https://x.com/ndea • https://x.com/bryanlanders • https://ndea.com

    48 min

  3. Mar 3

    Semantic Programming by Example with Pre-trained Models - Gust Verbruggen

    Gust Verbruggen, Senior AI researcher and member of the PROSE team at Microsoft, discusses his paper "Semantic Programming by Example with Pre-trained Models," which introduces a framework for integrating inductive program synthesis with large language models. The project emerged from an attempt to extend Flash Fill-style program synthesis beyond purely syntactic string transformations. Motivated by limitations in symbolic systems - especially their inability to access semantic knowledge without manually encoding it - Verbruggen and collaborators explored how GPT-3 could serve as a semantic oracle within the PROSE framework. The result is a neurosymbolic architecture that preserves the efficiency and guarantees of symbolic synthesis while selectively delegating semantic subproblems to a language model. In This Episode • Limitations of both program synthesis and LLMs • Programming by example • Syntactic versus semantic • Integrating GPT-3 as semantic operators • Semantic map, position, and condition operators • Deductive backpropagation in PROSE • Deferred query execution for efficiency • Greedy clustering to control search explosion • Ranking programs to minimize semantic calls References • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/prose/ • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/prose-framework/ • https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/seminars/seminar-calendar • Sumit Gulwani's Flash Fill talk: https://youtu.be/421gU482xFE About the Paper "Semantic Programming by Example with Pre-trained Models" Gust Verbruggen, Vu Le, Sumit Gulwani Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLA), 2021 This paper presents a framework for augmenting inductive program synthesis with semantic operators powered by large language models. By decomposing tasks into syntactic and semantic subproblems, the system delegates only the irreducibly semantic components to a pre-trained model, while maintaining symbolic guarantees elsewhere. A deferred query execution strategy allows efficient learning without excessive model calls. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485477 About the Guest Gust Verbruggen is a researcher at KU Leuven and a member of Microsoft’s PROSE team. His work focuses on program synthesis, data wrangling, and neurosymbolic integration, particularly in real-world automation settings such as spreadsheets and code refactoring tools. • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/gverbruggen/ • https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TmU3sKMAAAAJ&hl=en Credits • Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea • Editor: Alejandro Ramirez • https://x.com/ndea • https://x.com/bryanlanders • https://ndea.com

    1h 16m

  4. Feb 9 ·  Bonus

    February 2026 Podcast Recap

    Program synthesis is the problem of automatically generating code that satisfies a specification. The real challenge isn’t searching faster, it’s making the right parts of the search space searchable at all. This week's episode is a short recap of the podcast so far. Across the past 8 conversations - spanning grammar filtering, temporal synthesis, inductive logic programming, vision-language programs, and symbolic world models - we explore 3 emergent themes. 1. Shrinking the search space, without breaking correctness 2. Why "correct" programs still behave badly 3. The real meaning of "neurosymbolic" At a high level, all of the solutions we've explored are grappling with the problem of search - from problem representation to the optimal divide between neural and symbolic. Credits - Host, Editor, Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea https://x.com/ndea https://x.com/bryanlanders https://ndea.com

    6 min

  5. Feb 2

    Relational Decomposition for Program Synthesis - Céline Hocquette

    The way a problem is represented can determine whether it is solvable at all. Céline Hocquette, AI researcher at Ndea and former postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, discusses her paper “Relational Decomposition for Program Synthesis”, which introduces a representation-driven approach to inductive program synthesis based on decomposing examples into relational facts. The paper emerged from Hocquette’s long-standing engagement with inductive logic programming (ILP), beginning with her doctoral work at Imperial College London under Stephen Muggleton and continuing through her time in Andrew Cropper’s group in Oxford. Motivated by the scalability limits of learning long chains of reasoning, the work reflects a broader intellectual trajectory focused on making symbolic learning systems more efficient by rethinking representation and decomposition rather than adding domain-specific heuristics. In This Episode - • Inductive logic programming (ILP) • Deductive vs. inductive program synthesis • Relational vs. functional programs • Decomposing examples into logical facts • Datasets: ARC-AGI, 1D-ARC, strings, list functions • Systems & approaches: POPPER, ARGA, METABIAS, BEN, Hacker-Like References - • https://github.com/logic-and-learning-lab/Popper • https://andrewcropper.com/ • ARC-AGI - https://arcprize.org/arc-agi • 1D-ARC - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18354 • ARGA - https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09880 • METABIAS - https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/ECAI-546.pdf • BEN - https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.03094 • Hacker-Like - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50966-x About the Paper - “Relational Decomposition for Program Synthesis” Céline Hocquette, Andrew Cropper arXiv, 2024 The paper proposes transforming inductive program synthesis problems into sets of relational input–output facts, allowing systems to learn smaller, reusable logical rules instead of long functional compositions. This decomposition significantly improves scalability and generalization when learning programs from few examples across strings, lists, and ARC-style reasoning tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12212 About the Guest - Céline Hocquette, Technical Staff at Ndea, works on program synthesis, inductive logic programming, and symbolic reasoning. She completed her PhD at Imperial College London and previously held a research position at the University of Oxford in Andrew Cropper’s lab. Her work focuses on scalable learning of interpretable programs from small data. https://celinehocquette.github.io/ Credits - Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea Editor: Alejandro Ramirez https://x.com/ndea https://x.com/bryanlanders https://ndea.com

    48 min

  6. Jan 26

    Symbolic World Models - Top Piriyakulkij

    Wasu "Top" Piriyakulkij, PhD student at Cornell University advised by Kevin Ellis, discusses his paper "PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts." The episode explores how symbolic, programmatic world models can achieve strong generalization and sample efficiency by composing many small causal programs instead of learning a single monolithic model. The conversation traces how PoE-World emerged from earlier work on active concept learning and hypothesis testing, and how object-centric Atari environments became a natural testbed for scaling symbolic world models beyond grid worlds. Piriyakulkij reflects on design failures, surprising successes, and the moment the learned world model became interactive enough to serve as a real-time simulator. In This Episode - • Symbolic vs. neural world models • Products of programmatic experts • Modular causal rules as world models • Object-centric Atari environments • Montezuma’s Revenge as exploration benchmark • Sample-efficient learning from demonstrations • Weights as expert confidence signals • World models as executable simulators • Exploration as program testing References - • WorldCoder - https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12275 • Object-Centric Atari - https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08649v2 • ARC-AGI-3 - https://arcprize.org • VisualPredicator - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23156 • People: Marvin Minsky, François Chollet, Armando Solar-Lezama About the Paper - "PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts" Authors: Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Yishou Wang, Hao Tang, Martha Lewis, Kevin Ellis The paper introduces a symbolic world modeling framework in which many small, interpretable programs - each encoding a simple causal rule - are combined multiplicatively into a probabilistic world model. By learning weights over these programmatic experts from limited demonstrations, the system produces accurate, stochastic simulators that generalize to new environments with minimal data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10819 About the Guest - Wasu Top Piriyakulkij is a PhD student at Cornell University advised by Kevin Ellis. His research focuses on symbolic world models, program synthesis, and human-like learning and exploration in artificial agents. He is particularly interested in how compositional structure enables generalization in complex environments. • https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~wp237/ • https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nlO1TkkAAAAJ&hl=en Credits - Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea Editor: Alejandro Ramirez https://x.com/ndea https://x.com/bryanlanders https://ndea.com

    58 min

  7. Jan 19

    Vision-Language Programs - Antonia Wüst

    Antonia Wüst, PhD student at TU Darmstadt, discusses her paper "Synthesizing Visual Concepts as Vision-Language Programs," which introduces a neuro-symbolic approach to visual concept induction by combining vision-language models with program synthesis. The work grew out of Wüst’s early PhD research on visual concept learning with symbolic programs, initially in synthetic domains, and her dissatisfaction with reliance on pre-trained object detectors. As vision-language models matured, the project evolved into a broader attempt to treat these models as perceptual tools embedded within a symbolic reasoning system. In This Episode - • Strengths & weaknesses of vision-language models (VLMs) • Visual concept induction • Symbol grounding across image sets • Designing a domain-specific language (DSL) for visual reasoning • A probabilistic context-free grammar for program search • Interpretability benefits of synthesized visual programs • Bongard problems and human-like abstraction References - • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18964 • https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jcjohns/clevr/ • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongard_problem • https://wolfstam.github.io/ • https://www.hikarushindo.com/ • https://www.ml.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/people/lhelff/index.html • https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/20616 • https://arcprize.org/arc-agi About the Paper - “Synthesizing Visual Concepts as Vision-Language Programs” Antonia Wüst, Wolfgang Stammer, Hikaru Shindo, Lucas Nunes, Christian Kersting NeurIPS 2025 The paper presents a neuro-symbolic framework that combines vision-language models with program synthesis to learn visual concepts from examples. Vision-language models provide grounded symbolic representations, while program synthesis performs explicit reasoning to derive interpretable and reliable visual rules. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18964 About the Guest - Antonia Wüst is a PhD student at Technische Universität Darmstadt in the AI and Machine Learning Lab, supervised by Christian Kersting. Her research focuses on abstract visual reasoning, visual concept induction, and neuro-symbolic AI, with an emphasis on combining perception and symbolic reasoning. • https://www.ml.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/people/awuest/index.html • https://x.com/toniwuest Credits - Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea Editor: Alejandro Ramirez https://x.com/ndea https://x.com/bryanlanders https://ndea.com

    54 min

  8. Jan 12

    Inductive Logic Programming - Andrew Cropper

    Andrew Cropper, logic luminary and creator of the popular Popper, discusses the paper "Inductive Logic Programming at 30: A New Introduction."This episode examines how inductive logic programming (ILP) learns symbolic rules from examples and background knowledge, and what it takes to build ILP systems that scale. As machine learning has shifted toward opaque, data-hungry models, ILP offers a path to interpretable, constrained programs learned from data. The paper distills 30 years of ideas (learning settings, bias, search, recursion, predicate invention, and system design) into a modern entry point for symbolic generalization.Cropper reflects on how the paper emerged alongside his work on Popper, a high-performance ILP system designed around falsification and solver-backed search. He traces this line of thinking back to his training under Stephen Muggleton, the most influencial researcher in ILP.In This Episode -• Inductive bias to constrain search.• Utilizing SAT/ASP-style engines as solver tools.• Why recursion is a decisive capability for true generalization on algorithmic tasks.• Predicate invention enabling more compact programs and better abstraction.• Popper’s core idea: learning by ruling out hypotheses via failures.• A practical research workflow advantage: adding constraints to prune search can yield orders-of-magnitude speedups without rewriting the learner.• ILP in the wild: scientific discovery loops (the "Robot Scientist" pattern), program-by-example tools (Flash Fill), and rule learning to guide RL agents.References -• https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07912• https://github.com/logic-and-learning-lab/Popper/• https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html• https://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/14724639• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/automating-string-processing-spreadsheets-using-input-output-examples/About the Paper -"Inductive logic programming at 30: a new introduction"Andrew Cropper, Sebastijan DumančićJournal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 2022The paper explains how ILP learns symbolic rules from labeled examples plus background knowledge, and it breaks down ILP system design into learning settings, bias/representation choices, and search strategies. It also surveys major systems and practical limitations, framing modern ILP around solver-backed search, recursion, and predicate invention.https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07912About the Guest -Andrew Cropper is an Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki and a principal investigator at ELLIS Institute Finland, where he works on combining logical reasoning with machine learning. His research centers on inductive logic programming and on building high-performance ILP systems (including Popper) that leverage modern SAT/ASP/MaxSAT solving to learn interpretable rules from data. https://andrewcropper.com/Credits -Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, NdeaEditor: Alejandro Ramirezhttps://x.com/ndeahttps://x.com/bryanlandershttps://ndea.com

    1h 5m
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About

Go beyond the paper abstract to synthesize new ideas. AGI research lab Ndea presents the stories behind remarkable academic papers in the field of program synthesis.

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  • Creator
    Ndea
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ndea
  • Show Website
    Abstract Synthesis

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