← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.13005 · v1
The Shape of a Program: Path Signatures for Trace-to-Program Induction
首次提交 2026-11-09 03:53
版本更新 2026-11-09 03:53
雷达观测 2026-11-11 11:05
摘要
Synthesizing programs from execution traces is a fundamental challenge in algorithmic interpretability and the reverse engineering of complex systems. We bring a rough-path-theoretic perspective to program induction, treating execution traces as high-dimensional rough paths and encoding them with the path signature transform, a tool from stochastic analysis whose expectation provably characterizes the distribution of traces a program induces. On three program-induction domains, Karel, List, and RASP, our log-signature trace encoder outperforms LSTM, Transformer, and Fourier baselines in almost every setting, with its largest margins when training data is scarce. We further observe that the trace-to-program pipeline is naturally contractive: it often produces valid programs that are shorter than the ground truth. We turn this into a bootstrapping procedure that exposes redundancy in the ground-truth supervision without any external oracle, which we demonstrate on redundancy-injected versions of our datasets. Finally, the log-signature encoder induces a markedly more interpretable latent geometry than the baselines, in which the nearest neighbors of every state lie on its own execution trace.
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v1 · 2026-11-09 03:53 · 最新观测版本
The Shape of a Program: Path Signatures for Trace-to-Program Induction
Synthesizing programs from execution traces is a fundamental challenge in algorithmic interpretability and the reverse engineering of complex systems. We bring a rough-path-theoretic perspective to program induction, treating execution traces as high-dimensional rough paths and encoding them with the path signature transform, a tool from stochastic analysis whose expectation provably characterizes the distribution of traces a program induces. On three program-induction domains, Karel, List, and RASP, our log-signature trace encoder outperforms LSTM, Transformer, and Fourier baselines in almost every setting, with its largest margins when training data is scarce. We further observe that the trace-to-program pipeline is naturally contractive: it often produces valid programs that are shorter than the ground truth. We turn this into a bootstrapping procedure that exposes redundancy in the ground-truth supervision without any external oracle, which we demonstrate on redundancy-injected versions of our datasets. Finally, the log-signature encoder induces a markedly more interpretable latent geometry than the baselines, in which the nearest neighbors of every state lie on its own execution trace.
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