@inproceedings{gao-etal-2025-decompilebench,
    title = "{D}ecompile{B}ench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Decompilers in Real-World Scenarios",
    author = "Gao, Zeyu  and
      Cui, Yuxin  and
      Wang, Hao  and
      Qin, Siliang  and
      Wang, Yuanda  and
      Bolun, Zhang  and
      Zhang, Chao",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1194/",
    pages = "23250--23267",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Decompilers are fundamental tools for critical security tasks, from vulnerability discovery to malware analysis, yet their evaluation remains fragmented. Existing approaches primarily focus on syntactic correctness through synthetic micro-benchmarks or subjective human ratings, failing to address real-world requirements for semantic fidelity and analyst usability. We present **DecompileBench**, the first comprehensive framework that enables effective evaluation of decompilers in reverse engineering workflows through three key components: real-world function extraction (comprising 23,400 functions from 130 real-world programs), runtime-aware validation, and automated human-centric assessment using LLM-as-Judge to quantify the effectiveness of decompilers in reverse engineering workflows. Through a systematic comparison between six industrial-strength decompilers and six recent LLM-powered approaches, we demonstrate that LLM-based methods surpass commercial tools in code understandability despite 52.2{\%} lower functionality correctness. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based approaches to transform human-centric reverse engineering. We open source **DecompileBench** to provide a framework to advance research on decompilers and assist security experts in making informed tool selections based on their specific requirements."
}