A Joint Learning Model with Variational Interaction for Multilingual Program Translation
Programs implemented in various programming languages form the foundation of software applications. To alleviate the burden of program migration and facilitate the development of software systems, automated program translation across languages has garnered significant attention. Previous approaches primarily focus on pairwise translation paradigms, learning translation between pairs of languages using bilingual parallel data. However, parallel data is difficult to collect for some language pairs, and the distribution of program semantics across languages can shift, posing challenges for pairwise program translation. In this paper, we argue that jointly learning a unified model to translate code across multiple programming languages is superior to separately learning from bilingual parallel data. We propose Variational Interaction for Multilingual Program Translation~(VIM-PT), a disentanglement-based generative approach that jointly trains a unified model for multilingual program translation across multiple languages. VIM-PT disentangles code into language-shared and language-specific features, using variational inference and interaction information with a novel lower bound, then achieves program translation through conditional generation. VIM-PT demonstrates four advantages: 1) captures language-shared information more accurately from various implementations and improves the quality of multilingual program translation, 2) mines and leverages the capability of non-parallel data, 3) addresses the distribution shift of program semantics across languages, 4) and serves as a unified model, reducing deployment complexity.
Tue 29 OctDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
15:30 - 16:30 | Program and Code translationResearch Papers / Tool Demonstrations at Compagno Chair(s): Haiyan Zhao Peking University | ||
15:30 15mTalk | To Tag, or Not to Tag: Translating C’s Unions to Rust’s Tagged Unions Research Papers DOI | ||
15:45 15mTalk | Semi-Supervised Code Translation Overcoming the Scarcity of Parallel Code Data Research Papers Ming Zhu Virginia Tech, Mohimenul Karim Virginia Tech, Ismini Lourentzou Virginia Tech, Daphne Yao Virginia Tech | ||
16:00 15mTalk | A Joint Learning Model with Variational Interaction for Multilingual Program Translation Research Papers | ||
16:15 10mTalk | Automated Validation of COBOL to Java Transformation Tool Demonstrations Atul Kumar IBM Research India, Diptikalyan Saha IBM Research India, Toshiaki Yasue IBM Research - Tokyo, Kohichi Ono IBM Research - Tokyo, Saravanan Krishnan IBM India Research Lab, Sandeep Hans IBM India Research Lab, Fumiko Satoh IBM Research - Tokyo, Gerald Mitchell IBM Software, Sachin Kumar IBM Software |