{"doi":"10.1145/3712255.3726700","title":"Comparing PushGP and GPT-4o on Program Synthesis with only Input-Output Examples","abstract":"Genetic programming (GP) and large language models (LLMs) have both achieved notable success in program synthesis. However, the methods for specifying the desired program behavior (i.e., user intent) differ: GP relies on input-output examples, whereas LLMs use text descriptions. In this work, we compare the capabilities of a GP system, PushGP, and an LLM model, GPT-4o, in synthesizing programs where the user intent is specified through input-output examples. Using tasks from the PSB2 program synthesis benchmark, we found that PushGP solved more tasks than GPT-4o. While some tasks were successfully solved by both synthesizers, others were uniquely solved by only one of them, highlighting their complementary strengths. In addition to the prompt with just input-output examples (data-only), we tested GPT-4o with another prompt containing only a textual description of the task (text-only). Both prompt variants successfully solved the same 7 tasks (with different success rates), with the data-only prompt solving an additional task. Ultimately, each synthesizer is successful in distinct ways, highlighting differences in their underlying methodologies.","journal":"Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion","year":2025,"id":558778,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9535,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1333365,"name":"Anil Kumar Saini","orcid":"0000-0002-9211-1079","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1460003,"name":"Gabriel Ketron","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":14812,"name":"Jason H. Moore","orcid":"0000-0002-5015-1099","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1333364,"name":"Jose Guadalupe Hernandez","orcid":"0000-0002-1298-5551","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":10,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:55:30.312295Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}