Jiacheng Zhao
2024
Introducing Compiler Semantics into Large Language Models as Programming Language Translators: A Case Study of C to x86 Assembly
Shuoming Zhang
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Jiacheng Zhao
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Chunwei Xia
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Zheng Wang
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Yunji Chen
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Huimin Cui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Compilers are complex software containing millions of lines of code, taking years to develop. This paper investigates to what extent Large Language Models (LLMs) can replace hand-crafted compilers in translating high-level programming languages to machine instructions, using C to x86 assembly as a case study. We identify two challenges of using LLMs for code translation and introduce two novel data pre-processing techniques to address the challenges: numerical value conversion and training data resampling. While only using a 13B model, our approach achieves a behavioral accuracy of over 91%, outperforming the much larger GPT-4 Turbo model by over 50%. Our results are encouraging, showing that LLMs have the potential to transform how compilation tools are constructed.
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