# Recompilation Is Not Enough: Test-Guided Decompiled-C Repair

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07201/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17134/) (2024)
- [Nova: Generative Language Models for Assembly Code with Hierarchical Attention and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13721/) (2023)
- [The Fact Selection Problem in LLM-Based Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05520/) (2024)
- [Decompile-Bench: Million-Scale Binary-Source Function Pairs for Real-World Binary Decompilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12668/) (2025)
- [Fast, Fine-Grained Equivalence Checking for Neural Decompilers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04811/) (2025)
- [CODEFUSE-DEBENCH: An Empirical Study on Readability, Recompilability, and Functionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29490/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Decompiled C often becomes recompilable only after repair, but recompilation alone does not establish test-observed behavior. A recompiled command-line binary can still parse options incorrectly, print different bytes, or return a different exit status. We present a few-step workflow for repairing decompiled C using compiler feedback and related official tests. Compiler and linker diagnostics first guide build repair. Once the repaired C recompiles into a binary, smoke checks and related official tests expose behavioral discrepancies for semantic repair. In a preliminary static-enriched evaluation on 104 Coreutils 9.5 binaries with available decompiler exports and deterministic exact-output smoke comparisons, 91 binaries (87.5%) recompile and pass the test gate; 9 do not recompile within the repair budget, and 4 recompile but still fail the test gate. The result suggests that test-gate feedback can make LLM-assisted repair of decompiled C more auditable than compile-only recovery.