2023/02/21 by Aniketh Malyala, Malyala, Aniketh, Katelyn Zhou +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning and Data Classification #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.10812
openalex publication_date 2023/02/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the advent of new and advanced programming languages, it becomes imperative to migrate legacy software to new programming languages. Unsupervised Machine Learning-based Program Translation could play an essential role in such migration, even without a sufficiently sizeable reliable corpus of parallel source code. However, these translators are far from perfect due to their statistical nature. This work investigates unsupervised program translators and where and why they fail. With in-depth error analysis of such failures, we have identified that the cases where such translators fail follow a few particular patterns. With this insight, we develop a rule-based program mutation engine, which pre-processes the input code if the input follows specific patterns and post-process the output if the output follows certain patterns. We show that our code processing tool, in conjunction with the program translator, can form a hybrid program translator and significantly improve the state-of-the-art. In the future, we envision an end-to-end program translation tool where programming domain knowledge can be embedded into an ML-based translation pipeline using pre- and post-processing steps.