Compile by Training

Turn a natural-language function description into a reusable neural program.

Compile by Training uses teacher models to generate examples, finetunes a small PAW interpreter, and produces a .paw function that runs locally without further teacher calls.

Requires Python 3.10+, uv, and an OpenAI API key. The default recipe is intended for an accelerator with about 40 GB of available memory; use a lower --micro-batch-size or --gradient-checkpointing on smaller devices.

Compile

Set an OpenAI API key and run the script:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=...
uv run compile.py "Classify sentiment. Return only positive, negative, or neutral." -o sentiment.paw

The script saves sentiment.paw, installs it in the local PAW cache, and prints its program ID. Use the ID with the PAW Python package:

pip install programasweights --extra-index-url https://pypi.programasweights.com/simple/

import programasweights as paw

sentiment = paw.function("<program-id>")
print(sentiment("I loved it."))

The program downloads the shared 0.6B interpreter once, then runs locally. A PAW API key is optional; setting PAW_API_KEY provides higher hosted compile limits.

Mapper assets and completed teacher synthesis are cached, so rerunning the same specification and recipe reuses finished work.

Customize

The defaults reproduce the released Compile by Training recipe. Every major choice can be changed from the command line:

uv run compile.py "Classify sentiment. Return only positive or negative." \
  --teacher gpt-5.4-mini=800 \
  --teacher gpt-5.5=400 \
  --steps 80 \
  --batch-size 32 \
  --micro-batch-size 8 \
  --learning-rate 1e-4 \
  -o sentiment.paw

uv run compile.py --print-config
uv run compile.py --help

How it works

1. Compile the specification once with the fast PAW compiler to initialize the neural program.
2. Ask teacher models to generate task-specific input-output examples.
3. Finetune the local interpreter on those examples.
4. Package the result as a reusable .paw function.

The implementation is contained in compile.py.

Paper

Compile by Training: Turning Natural-Language Specifications into Local Neural Functions, Yuntian Deng, Pengyu Nie, and Stuart Shieber.

License

MIT