This is a special episode of the Abstract Synthesis podcast featuring a series of live interviews from NeurIPS 2025 in sunny San Diego, California.

Rather than centering on a single paper, this episode captures a snapshot of the current research landscape at the Neural Information Processing Systems annual conference, highlighting how program synthesis and symbolic reasoning are increasingly intersecting with vision, reinforcement learning, world models, and scientific discovery.

The conversations collectively illustrate why these ideas are resurfacing as key tools for efficiency, interpretability, and generalization.

In This Episode -

• Visual concept induction using program synthesis combined with vision-language models

• Program synthesis as a tool for scientific discovery and interpretability in quantum computing

• Symbolic world modeling and efficiency-driven learning in reinforcement learning environments

• Composed program induction on structured domains such as the Rubik’s cube• Program synthesis as a lens for understanding brain, behavior, and neural representations

• Interpretability perspectives framing neural network training as an implicit form of program synthesis

Guests & Papers Mentioned -Clément Bonnet / Technical Staff, Ndeahttps://x.com/ClementBonnet16https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08706Antonia Wüst / PhD Student, TU Darmstadthttps://ml-research.github.io/people/awuest/index.htmlhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18964Leopoldo Sarra / Senior AI Research Scientist, Axiomatic_AIhttps://leopoldo.sarra.eu/https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00230Wasu Top Piriyakulkij / PhD Student, Cornell Universityhttps://www.cs.cornell.edu/~wp237/https://topwasu.github.io/poe-worldJumyung Park / Student, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)https://jumyung-park.vercel.app/https://intrig.vercel.app/research/composed-program-induction-with-latent-program-latticeColin “Coco” Conwell / Research Scientist, MIThttps://colinconwell.com/https://openreview.net/forum?id=nuZBUyzBs0Chris Hamblin / Research Scientist, After Thoughthttps://chrishamblin.xyz/

Other Mentions -DreamCoder, Kevin Ellis et al.https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381ARC-AGI Benchmarkhttps://arcprize.org/arc-agiCredits -

• Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea• Camera & Audio: Rowan Rintala• Editor: Alejandro Ramirez• https://x.com/ndea• https://x.com/bryanlanders• https://ndea.com