@inproceedings{wu-etal-2026-bootstrapping,
    title = "Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration",
    author = "Wu, Yuhan  and
      Zhang, Huan  and
      Cheng, Wei  and
      Shen, Chen  and
      Yang, Jingyue  and
      Hu, Wei",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1678/",
    pages = "36247--36259",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Code translation across multiple programming languages is essential yet challenging due to two vital obstacles: scarcity of parallel data paired with executable test oracles, and optimization imbalance when handling diverse language pairs. We propose BootTrans, a bootstrapping method that resolves both obstacles. Its key idea is to leverage the functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites, adapting abundant pivot-language unit tests to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual reinforcement learning (RL) training. Our method introduces a dual-pool architecture with seed and exploration pools to progressively expand training data via execution-guided experience collection.Furthermore, we design a language-aware weighting mechanism that dynamically prioritizes harder translation directions based on relative performance across sibling languages, mitigating optimization imbalance. Extensive experiments on the HumanEval-X and TransCoder-Test benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline LLMs across all translation directions, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of both bootstrapping and weighting components."
}