# Neural architectures for resolving references in program code

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14073 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14073/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [GECOR: An End-to-End Generative Ellipsis and Co-reference Resolution Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12086/) (2019)
- [CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09914/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Resolving and rewriting references is fundamental in programming languages. Motivated by a real-world decompilation task, we abstract reference rewriting into the problems of direct and indirect indexing by permutation. We create synthetic benchmarks for these tasks and show that well-known sequence-to-sequence machine learning architectures are struggling on these benchmarks. We introduce new sequence-to-sequence architectures for both problems. Our measurements show that our architectures outperform the baselines in both robustness and scalability: our models can handle examples that are ten times longer compared to the best baseline. We measure the impact of our architecture in the real-world task of decompiling switch statements, which has an indexing subtask. According to our measurements, the extended model decreases the error rate by 42%. Multiple ablation studies show that all components of our architectures are essential.