Semantic Alignment-Enhanced Code Translation via an LLM-Based Multi-Agent System
This work addresses the problem of improving the quality of LLM-generated code translations for software developers and engineers by reducing syntax and semantic errors, which is an incremental improvement to existing LLM-based methods.
This paper introduces TRANSAGENT, an LLM-based multi-agent system designed to improve code translation by fixing syntax and semantic errors. It achieves this by localizing error code blocks through execution alignment between source and target programs, narrowing down the debugging scope. Evaluated on a new benchmark, TRANSAGENT outperforms UniTrans in both translation effectiveness and efficiency.
Code translation converts code from one programming language to another while maintaining its original functionality, which is crucial for software migration, system refactoring, and cross-platform development. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually-written rules, which can be time-consuming and often result in less readable code. To overcome this, learning-based methods have been developed, leveraging parallel data to train models for automated code translation. More recently, the advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) further boosts learning-based code translation. Although promising, LLM-translated program still suffers from diverse quality issues (e.g., syntax errors and semantic errors). In particular, it can be challenging for LLMs to self-debug these errors when simply provided with the corresponding error messages. In this work, we propose a novel LLM-based multi-agent system TRANSAGENT, which enhances LLM-based code translation by fixing the syntax errors and semantic errors with the synergy between four LLM-based agents, including Initial Code Translator, Syntax Error Fixer, Code Aligner, and Semantic Error Fixer. The main insight of TRANSAGENT is to first localize the error code block in the target program based on the execution alignment between the target and source program, which can narrow down the fixing space and thus lower down the fixing difficulties. To evaluate TRANSAGENT, we first construct a new benchmark from recent programming tasks to mitigate the potential data leakage issue. On our benchmark, TRANSAGENT outperforms the latest LLM-based code translation technique UniTrans in both translation effectiveness and efficiency; additionally, our evaluation on different LLMs show the generalization of TRANSAGENT and our ablation study shows the contribution of each agent.