Rectifier: Code Translation with Corrector via LLMs

TL;DR

This paper introduces Rectifier, a universal error corrector for code translation using LLMs, significantly improving translation accuracy across multiple programming languages by repairing common errors.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel universal corrector model that learns from LLM-generated errors to repair code translations, enhancing robustness and accuracy across languages.

Findings

Effective repair of translation errors in C++, Java, and Python

Improved translation accuracy demonstrated through experiments

Robustness confirmed via cross-language experiments

Abstract

Software migration is garnering increasing attention with the evolution of software and society. Early studies mainly relied on handcrafted translation rules to translate between two languages, the translation process is error-prone and time-consuming. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the use of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) in code translation. However, code translation is a complex task that LLMs would generate mistakes during code translation, they all produce certain types of errors when performing code translation tasks, which include (1) compilation error, (2) runtime error, (3) functional error, and (4) non-terminating execution. We found that the root causes of these errors are very similar (e.g. failure to import packages, errors in loop boundaries, operator errors, and more). In this paper, we propose a general corrector, namely Rectifier, which is a micro and universal model for repairing translation errors. It learns from errors generated by existing LLMs and can be widely applied to correct errors generated by any LLM. The experimental results on translation tasks between C++, Java, and Python show that our model has effective repair ability, and cross experiments also demonstrate the robustness of our method.