Large language models are becoming increasingly practical for translating
code across programming languages, a process known as $transpiling$. Even
though automated transpilation significantly boosts developer productivity, a
key concern is whether the generated code is correct. Existing work initially
used manually crafted test suites to test the translations of a small corpus of
programs; these test suites were later automated. In contrast, we devise the
first approach for automated, functional, property-based testing of code
translation models. Our general, user-provided specifications about the
transpiled code capture a range of properties, from purely syntactic to purely
semantic ones. As shown by our experiments, this approach is very effective in
detecting property violations in popular code translation models, and
therefore, in evaluating model quality with respect to given properties. We
also go a step further and explore the usage scenario where a user simply aims
to obtain a correct translation of some code with respect to certain properties
without necessarily being concerned about the overall quality of the model. To
this purpose, we develop the first property-guided search procedure for code
translation models, where a model is repeatedly queried with slightly different
parameters to produce alternative and potentially more correct translations.
Our results show that this search procedure helps to obtain significantly
better code translations.

大型语言模型在不同编程语言之间进行翻译的过程中变得越来越实用，但关键问题在于生成的代码是否准确。本文提出了第一种用于自动进行功能属性测试的代码翻译模型的方法，并探讨了基于属性的代码翻译模型搜索过程，结果显示该方法能够有效检测流行代码翻译模型中的属性违规并获得更好的代码翻译。