@inproceedings{heakl-etal-2025-guaranteed,
    title = "Guaranteed Guess: A Language Modeling Approach for {CISC}-to-{RISC} Transpilation with Testing Guarantees",
    author = "Heakl, Ahmed  and
      Hashmi, Sarim  and
      Abi, Chaimaa  and
      Lee, Celine  and
      Mahmoud, Abdulrahman",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.findings-emnlp.1330/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1330",
    pages = "24474--24488",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "The hardware ecosystem is rapidly evolving, with increasing interest in translating low-level programs across different *instruction set architectures* (ISAs) in a quick, flexible, and correct way to enhance the portability and longevity of existing code. A particularly challenging class of this transpilation problem is translating between complex- (CISC) and reduced- (RISC) hardware architectures, due to fundamental differences in instruction complexity, memory models, and execution paradigms. In this work, we introduce GG (**G**uaranteed **G**uess), an ISA-centric transpilation pipeline that combines the translation power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with the rigor of established software testing constructs. Our method generates candidate translations using an LLM from one ISA to another, and embeds such translations within a software-testing framework to build quantifiable confidence in the translation. We evaluate our GG approach over two diverse datasets, enforce high code coverage ($>$98{\%}) across unit tests, and achieve functional/semantic correctness of 99{\%} on HumanEval programs and 49{\%} on BringupBench programs, respectively. Further, we compare our approach to the state-of-the-art Rosetta 2 framework on Apple Silicon, showcasing 1.73$\times$ faster runtime performance, 1.47$\times$ better energy efficiency, and 2.41$\times$ better memory usage for our transpiled code, demonstrating the effectiveness of GG for real-world CISC-to-RISC translation tasks. We will open-source our codes, data, models, and benchmarks to establish a common foundation for ISA-level code translation research."
}