PACT

PACT (JAWS): Proactive Semantic Checklists for Robust Code Translation

Status: We are currently cleaning up and documenting the repository. We will release the full code soon (after organizing).

This project accompanies our paper:

“Fixing Less by Preventing More: Semantic Checklists for Robust Code Translation” (see JAWS.pdf in this release).

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What this framework is

PACT is a modular, agentic framework for LLM-based code translation that shifts from reactive “translate-then-repair” to proactive semantic guidance.

Instead of relying on multiple repair iterations after failures, PACT:

• extracts multi-granularity semantics from the source program,
• runs static analysis to surface cross-language semantic risk factors,
• infers a prioritized checklist of likely translation pitfalls,
• translates under explicit constraints,
• validates via compilation/execution tests,
• early-exits when the first translation passes,
• otherwise enters a bounded diagnose-and-repair loop using diagnostic feedback.

The codebase is designed for research: ablations, alternative checklists/verifiers, and dataset extensions are first-class goals.

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Why proactive semantic guidance?

Many translation errors are semantic (e.g., type width, operator meaning, control-flow corner cases). Traditional translate-then-repair often fixes “surface failures” (missing imports, minor compile issues), while the root semantic mismatch persists.

PACT prevents these errors by surfacing cross-language semantic constraints before generation, and requiring the translation to satisfy them.

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Method at a glance (paper → implementation)

PACT follows the pipeline illustrated in the paper (Fig. 2):

1. Semantics Architect

   • Builds a semantic summary of the source code (program/function/operator/variable-level).
   • Produces structured context that is stable across translation attempts.

2. Quality Assurance Architect

   • Infers a hierarchical semantic checklist of potential translation issues.
   • Labels items by severity:
     • CRITICAL = must be enforced as hard constraints
     • WARNING = best-effort improvements

3. Translation Synthesizer

   • Generates the target code under checklist constraints.
   • Runs compilation/execution validation.
   • Uses early-exit if the first attempt passes all tests.
   • Otherwise activates an optional bounded loop that incorporates diagnostic feedback until convergence or the attempt budget is exhausted.