Searching Latent Program Spaces

Matthew Macfarlane (University of Amsterdam) · Clem Bonnet (Ndea)
combinatorial spacesgeneral intelligencegradient updatesimplicit programsin-context learninglatent program networklatent spaceout-of-distribution tasksprogram synthesisprogramming-by-examplesscalabilitystochastic samplingsymbolic approachestest-time adaptationtest-time training

General intelligence requires systems that acquire new skills efficiently and generalize beyond their training distributions. Although program synthesis approaches have strong generalization power, they face scaling issues due to large combinatorial spaces that quickly make them impractical and require human-generated DSLs or pre-trained priors to narrow this search space. On the other hand, deep learning methods have had high successes, but they lack structured test-time adaptation and rely on heavy stochastic sampling or expensive gradient updates for fine-tuning. In this work, we propose the Latent Program Network (LPN), a new architecture that builds in test-time search directly into neural models. LPN learns a latent space of implicit programs