What's Decidable about Syntax-Guided Synthesis?

Abstract: Syntax-guided synthesis (SyGuS) is a recently proposed framework for program synthesis problems. The SyGuS problem is to find an expression or program generated by a given grammar that meets a correctness specification. Correctness specifications are given as formulas in suitable logical theories, typically amongst those studied in satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). In this work, we analyze the decidability of the SyGuS problem for different classes of grammars and correctness specifications. We prove that the SyGuS problem is undecidable for the theory of equality with uninterpreted functions (EUF).We identify a fragment of EUF, which we call regular-EUF, for which the SyGuS problem is decidable. We prove that this restricted problem is EXPTIME-complete and that the sets of solution expressions are precisely the regular tree languages. For theories that admit a unique, finite domain, we give a general algorithm to solve the SyGuS problem on tree grammars. Finite-domain theories include the bit-vector theory without concatenation. We prove SyGuS undecidable for a very simple bit-vector theory with concatenation, both for context-free grammars and for tree grammars. Finally, we give some additional results for linear arithmetic and bit-vector arithmetic along with a discussion of the implication of these results.