Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03512v1
• Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:56:44 GMT
• Title: Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration
• Authors: Yuhan Wu, Huan Zhang, Wei Cheng, Chen Shen, Jingyue Yang, Wei Hu,
• Abstract summary: We propose BootTrans, a bootstrapping method for code translation across languages.<n>Its key idea is to leverage the functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites.<n>Our method introduces a dual-pool architecture with seed and exploration pools to progressively expand training data.
• Score: 22.90890448332095
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Code translation across multiple programming languages is essential yet challenging due to two vital obstacles: scarcity of parallel data paired with executable test oracles, and optimization imbalance when handling diverse language pairs. We propose BootTrans, a bootstrapping method that resolves both obstacles. Its key idea is to leverage the functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites, adapting abundant pivot-language unit tests to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual RL training. Our method introduces a dual-pool architecture with seed and exploration pools to progressively expand training data via execution-guided experience collection. Furthermore, we design a language-aware weighting mechanism that dynamically prioritizes harder translation directions based on relative performance across sibling languages, mitigating optimization imbalance. Extensive experiments on the HumanEval-X and TransCoder-Test benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline LLMs across all translation directions, with ablations validating the effectiveness of both bootstrapping and weighting components.

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