Chun Yong Chong

Author directory

2026

Transpilation, or code translation, aims to convert source code from one programming language (PL) to another. Recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches have demonstrated immense potential for code translation. Training-based methods are important because LLMs currently do not effectively adapt to domain-specific settings that suffer from a lack of knowledge without targeted training. However, existing training-based approaches rely on a pairwise transpilation paradigm, making it impractical to support a diverse range of PLs. Furthermore, these methods shape the reinforcement learning (RL) reward linearly in the test-case pass rate, which underweights the earliest partial progress. To address these limitations, we propose CodePivot, a training framework that leverages Python as an intermediate representation (IR), augmented by a novel RL reward mechanism, Aggressive-Partial-Functional reward, to bootstrap the model’s multilingual transpilation ability with reduced reliance on parallel corpora. Experiments involving 10 PLs show that the resulting 7B model, trained on Python-to-Others tasks, consistently improves performance across both general and low-resource PL-related transpilation tasks. It outperforms substantially larger mainstream models with hundreds of billions more parameters, such as DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, on Python-to-Others tasks and Others-to-All tasks, respectively, and surpasses its counterpart trained directly on Any-to-Any tasks on general transpilation tasks. Code and data: https://github.com/lishangyu-hkust/CodePivot.
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to automate real-world vulnerability detection due to two key limitations: the heterogeneity of vulnerability patterns undermines the effectiveness of a single unified model, and manual prompt engineering for massive weakness categories is unscalable.To address these challenges, we propose MulVul, a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework designed for precise and broad-coverage vulnerability detection. MulVul adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy: a Router agent first predicts the top- coarse categories and then forwards the input to specialized Detector agents, which identify the exact vulnerability types. Both agents use evidence retrieved from vulnerability knowledge bases to mitigate hallucinations. Crucially, to automate the generation of specialized prompts, we design Cross-Model Prompt Evolution, a prompt optimization mechanism where a generator LLM iteratively refines candidate prompts while a distinct executor LLM validates their effectiveness. This decoupling mitigates the self-correction bias inherent in single-model optimization. Evaluated on 130 CWE types, MulVul achieves 34.79% Macro-F1, outperforming the best baseline by 41.5%. Ablation studies validate cross-model prompt evolution, which boosts performance by 51.6% over manual prompts by effectively handling diverse vulnerability patterns.