Synthesis of Mathematical programs from Natural Language Specifications

Abstract: Several decision problems that are encountered in various business domains can be modeled as mathematical programs, i.e. optimization problems. The process of conducting such modeling often requires the involvement of experts trained in operations research and advanced algorithms. Surprisingly, despite the significant advances in the methods for program and code synthesis, AutoML, learning to optimize etc., there has been little or no attention paid to automating the task of synthesizing mathematical programs. We imagine a scenario where the specifications for modeling, i.e. the objective and constraints are expressed in an unstructured form in natural language (NL) and the mathematical program has to be synthesized from such an NL specification. In this work we evaluate the efficacy of employing CodeT5 with data augmentation and post-processing of beams. We utilize GPT-3 with back translation for generation of synthetic examples. Further we apply rules of linear programming to score beams and correct beams based on common error patterns. We observe that with these enhancements CodeT5 base gives an execution accuracy of 0.73 which is significantly better than zero-shot execution accuracy of 0.41 by ChatGPT and 0.36 by Codex.