pith. sign in

super hub Mixed citations

Program Synthesis with Large Language Models

Mixed citation behavior. Most common role is background (52%).

435 Pith papers citing it
Background 52% of classified citations
abstract

This paper explores the limits of the current generation of large language models for program synthesis in general purpose programming languages. We evaluate a collection of such models (with between 244M and 137B parameters) on two new benchmarks, MBPP and MathQA-Python, in both the few-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our benchmarks are designed to measure the ability of these models to synthesize short Python programs from natural language descriptions. The Mostly Basic Programming Problems (MBPP) dataset contains 974 programming tasks, designed to be solvable by entry-level programmers. The MathQA-Python dataset, a Python version of the MathQA benchmark, contains 23914 problems that evaluate the ability of the models to synthesize code from more complex text. On both datasets, we find that synthesis performance scales log-linearly with model size. Our largest models, even without finetuning on a code dataset, can synthesize solutions to 59.6 percent of the problems from MBPP using few-shot learning with a well-designed prompt. Fine-tuning on a held-out portion of the dataset improves performance by about 10 percentage points across most model sizes. On the MathQA-Python dataset, the largest fine-tuned model achieves 83.8 percent accuracy. Going further, we study the model's ability to engage in dialog about code, incorporating human feedback to improve its solutions. We find that natural language feedback from a human halves the error rate compared to the model's initial prediction. Additionally, we conduct an error analysis to shed light on where these models fall short and what types of programs are most difficult to generate. Finally, we explore the semantic grounding of these models by fine-tuning them to predict the results of program execution. We find that even our best models are generally unable to predict the output of a program given a specific input.

hub tools

citation-role summary

background 57 dataset 41 method 4 other 2

citation-polarity summary

claims ledger

  • abstract This paper explores the limits of the current generation of large language models for program synthesis in general purpose programming languages. We evaluate a collection of such models (with between 244M and 137B parameters) on two new benchmarks, MBPP and MathQA-Python, in both the few-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our benchmarks are designed to measure the ability of these models to synthesize short Python programs from natural language descriptions. The Mostly Basic Programming Problems (MBPP) dataset contains 974 programming tasks, designed to be solvable by entry-level programmers. The M

authors

co-cited works

clear filters

representative citing papers

Gradient-Based Program Synthesis with Neurally Interpreted Languages

cs.LG · 2026-04-20 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0

NLI autonomously discovers a vocabulary of primitive operations and interprets variable-length programs via a neural executor, allowing end-to-end training and gradient-based test-time adaptation that outperforms prior methods on combinatorial generalization tasks.

Large Language Diffusion Models

cs.CL · 2025-02-14 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0

LLaDA is a scalable diffusion-based language model that matches autoregressive LLMs like LLaMA3 8B on tasks and surpasses GPT-4o on reversal poem completion.

Masked Diffusion Decoding as $x$-Prediction Flow

cs.CL · 2026-06-27 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Masked diffusion LMs can use continuous x-prediction flow with token-wise asynchronous updates and an RL policy network to reach 97% performance on HumanEval using only 25% of the usual decoding budget.

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

cs.LG · 2026-06-17 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Language-model-guided program synthesis can approximate transformer attention heads with over 75% IoU fidelity on held-out data and allow replacing 25% of heads with only 16% average perplexity increase.

citing papers explorer

Showing 50 of 55 citing papers after filters.