Abstract-The classical formulation of the program-synthesis problem is to find a program that meets a correctness specification given as a logical formula. Recent work on program synthesis and program optimization illustrates many potential benefits of allowing the user to supplement the logical specification with a syntactic template that constrains the space of allowed implementations. Our goal is to identify the core computational problem common to these proposals in a logical framework. The input to the syntax-guided synthesis problem (SyGuS) consists of a background theory, a semantic correctness specification for the desired program given by a logical formula, and a syntactic set of candidate implementations given by a grammar. The computational problem then is to find an implementation from the set of candidate expressions so that it satisfies the specification in the given theory. We describe three different instantiations of the counter-example-guided-inductive-synthesis (CEGIS) strategy for solving the synthesis problem, report on prototype implementations, and present experimental results on an initial set of benchmarks.

This is the full version of the paper, and includes proofs omitted from the short version.Abstract-We focus on (partial) functions that map input strings to a monoid such as the set of integers with addition and the set of output strings with concatenation. The notion of regularity for such functions has been defined using two-way finite-state transducers, (one-way) cost register automata, and MSO-definable graph transformations. In this paper, we give an algebraic and machine-independent characterization of this class analogous to the definition of regular languages by regular expressions. When the monoid is commutative, we prove that every regular function can be constructed from constant functions using the combinators of choice, split sum, and iterated sum, that are analogs of union, concatenation, and Kleene-*, respectively, but enforce unique (or unambiguous) parsing. Our main result is for the general case of non-commutative monoids, which is of particular interest for capturing regular string-tostring transformations for document processing. We prove that the following additional combinators suffice for constructing all regular functions: (1) the left-additive versions of split sum and iterated sum, which allow transformations such as string reversal; (2) sum of functions, which allows transformations such as copying of strings; and (3) function composition, or alternatively, a new concept of chained sum, which allows output values from adjacent blocks to mix.

We propose a deterministic model for associating costs with strings that is parameterized by operations of interest (such as addition, scaling, and minimum), a notion of regularity that provides a yardstick to measure expressiveness, and study decision problems and theoretical properties of resulting classes of cost functions. Our definition of regularity relies on the theory of string-to-tree transducers, and allows associating costs with events that are conditioned on regular properties of future events. Our model of cost register automata allows computation of regular functions using multiple "write-only" registers whose values can be combined using the allowed set of operations. We show that the classical shortest-path algorithms as well as the algorithms designed for computing discounted costs can be adapted for solving the min-cost problems for the more general classes of functions specified in our model. Cost register automata with the operations of minimum and increment give a deterministic model that is equivalent to weighted automata, an extensively studied nondeterministic model, and this connection results in new insights and new open problems.

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