Unsupervised Learning by Program Synthesis

We introduce an unsupervised learning algorithm that combines probabilistic modeling with solver-based techniques for program synthesis. We apply our techniques toboth a visual learning domain and a language learning problem, showing that our algorithm can learn many visual concepts from only a few examples and that it can recover some English inflectional morphology. Taken together, these results give both a new approach to unsupervised learning of symbolic compositional structures,and a technique for applying program synthesis tools to noisy data.