Programming support for autonomizing software

Abstract

Most traditional software systems are not built with the artificial intelligence support (AI) in mind. Among them, some may require human interventions to operate, e.g., the manual specification of the parameters in the data processing programs, or otherwise, would behave poorly. We propose a novel framework called Autonomizer to autonomize these systems by installing the AI into the traditional programs. Autonomizer is general so it can be applied to many real-world applications. We provide the primitives and the runtime support, where the primitives abstract common tasks of autonomization and the runtime support realizes them transparently. With the support of Autonomizer, the users can gain the AI support with little engineering efforts. Like many other AI applications, the challenge lies in the feature selection, which we address by proposing multiple automated strategies based on the program analysis. Our experiment results on nine real-world applications show that the autonomization only requires adding a few lines to the source code. Besides, for the data-processing programs, Autonomizer improves the output quality by 161% on average over the default settings. For the interactive programs such as game/driving, Autonomizer achieves higher success rate with lower training time than existing autonomized programs.