D-LiFT: Improving LLM-based Decompiler Backend via Code Quality-driven Fine-tuning

TL;DR

D-LIFT enhances LLM-based decompilers by fine-tuning with a code quality-aware reinforcement learning approach, significantly improving the readability and accuracy of decompiled code while preserving correctness.

Contribution

The paper introduces D-LIFT, a novel fine-tuning method for LLM-based decompilers that uses a new code quality assessment system, D-Score, to improve output quality without sacrificing accuracy.

Findings

55.3% more improved decompiled functions with D-LIFT

Improves 68.2% of all decompiled functions

Demonstrates significant quality improvements on coreutils and util-linux projects

Abstract

As one of the key tools in many security tasks, decompilers reconstruct human-readable source code from binaries. Yet, despite recent advances, their outputs often suffer from syntactic and semantic errors and remain difficult to read. Recently, with the advent of large language models (LLMs), researchers began to explore the potential of LLMs to refine decompiler output. Nevertheless, our study of these approaches reveals their problems, such as introducing new errors and relying on unreliable accuracy validation. In this paper, we present D-LIFT, an enhanced decompiler-LLM pipeline with a fine-tuned LLM using code quality-aware reinforcement learning. Unlike prior work that overlooks preserving accuracy, D-LIFT adheres to a key principle for enhancing the quality of decompiled code: preserving accuracy while improving readability. Central to D-LIFT, we propose D-Score, an integrated code quality assessment system to score the decompiled source code from multiple aspects, and use it to guide reinforcement learning fine-tuning and to select the best output during inference. In line with our principle, D-Score assigns low scores to any inaccurate output and only awards higher scores for readability to code that passes the accuracy check. Our implementation, based on Ghidra and a range of LLMs, demonstrates significant improvements for the accurate decompiled code from the coreutils and util-linux projects. Compared to baseline LLMs without D-Score-driven fine-tuning, our trained LLMs produce 55.3% more improved decompiled functions, as measured by D-Score. Overall, D-LIFT improves the quality of 68.2% of all the functions produced by the native decompiler.