One Task at a Time: Task-Level Adaptation for Inductive Program Synthesis

Master Thesis (2026)
Author(s)

S.M. Rasing (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor(s)

S. Dumančić – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

T.R. Hinnerichs – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

S. Proksch – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2026
Language
English
Graduation Date
31-08-2026
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Programme
Computer Science
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Page Views
20
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

Existing Inductive Program Synthesis (IPS) techniques generate programs from
examples and are restricted to specific task classes to exploit domain knowledge.
To compete with general-purpose LLM-based code generation, a single IPS system
must handle tasks with different types of inputs, outputs, and instructions without
relying on domain-specific knowledge. This thesis introduces task-level adapta-
tion, a framework in which a synthesizer must learn how to search only from the in-
dividual task it is solving rather than from a predefined domain. We focus specific-
ally on search guided by automatically generated properties that capture useful
aspects of a program’s output. We introduce PHALCON to demonstrate the frame-
work’s viability. PHALCON repeatedly samples programs, selects properties that
distinguish incorrect outputs from intended behavior, and uses them to constrain
subsequent sampling. PHALCON outperforms state-of-the-art techniques special-
ized for string and bit-vector transformations, and solves tasks from the challenging
Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus. These results establish task-level adaptation as
a promising foundation for efficient, general program synthesis.

Files

License info not available