16,378 research outputs found
A Theory of Formal Synthesis via Inductive Learning
Formal synthesis is the process of generating a program satisfying a
high-level formal specification. In recent times, effective formal synthesis
methods have been proposed based on the use of inductive learning. We refer to
this class of methods that learn programs from examples as formal inductive
synthesis. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for formal
inductive synthesis. We discuss how formal inductive synthesis differs from
traditional machine learning. We then describe oracle-guided inductive
synthesis (OGIS), a framework that captures a family of synthesizers that
operate by iteratively querying an oracle. An instance of OGIS that has had
much practical impact is counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). We
present a theoretical characterization of CEGIS for learning any program that
computes a recursive language. In particular, we analyze the relative power of
CEGIS variants where the types of counterexamples generated by the oracle
varies. We also consider the impact of bounded versus unbounded memory
available to the learning algorithm. In the special case where the universe of
candidate programs is finite, we relate the speed of convergence to the notion
of teaching dimension studied in machine learning theory. Altogether, the
results of the paper take a first step towards a theoretical foundation for the
emerging field of formal inductive synthesis
Active Learning from Imperfect Labelers
We study active learning where the labeler can not only return incorrect
labels but also abstain from labeling. We consider different noise and
abstention conditions of the labeler. We propose an algorithm which utilizes
abstention responses, and analyze its statistical consistency and query
complexity under fairly natural assumptions on the noise and abstention rate of
the labeler. This algorithm is adaptive in a sense that it can automatically
request less queries with a more informed or less noisy labeler. We couple our
algorithm with lower bounds to show that under some technical conditions, it
achieves nearly optimal query complexity.Comment: To appear in NIPS 201
An optimal quantum algorithm for the oracle identification problem
In the oracle identification problem, we are given oracle access to an
unknown N-bit string x promised to belong to a known set C of size M and our
task is to identify x. We present a quantum algorithm for the problem that is
optimal in its dependence on N and M. Our algorithm considerably simplifies and
improves the previous best algorithm due to Ambainis et al. Our algorithm also
has applications in quantum learning theory, where it improves the complexity
of exact learning with membership queries, resolving a conjecture of Hunziker
et al.
The algorithm is based on ideas from classical learning theory and a new
composition theorem for solutions of the filtered -norm semidefinite
program, which characterizes quantum query complexity. Our composition theorem
is quite general and allows us to compose quantum algorithms with
input-dependent query complexities without incurring a logarithmic overhead for
error reduction. As an application of the composition theorem, we remove all
log factors from the best known quantum algorithm for Boolean matrix
multiplication.Comment: 16 pages; v2: minor change
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