Decompilation is a widely used process for reverse engineers to significantly enhance code readability by lifting assembly code to a higher-level C-like language, pseudo-code. Nevertheless, the process of compilation and stripping irreversibly discards high-level semantic information that is crucial to code comprehension, such as comments, identifier names, and types. Existing approaches typically recover only one type of information, making them suboptimal for semantic inference. In this paper, we treat pseudo-code as a special programming language, then present a unified pre-trained model, HexT5, that is trained on vast amounts of natural language comments, source identifiers, and pseudo-code using novel pseudo-code-based pretraining objectives. We fine-tune HexT5 on various downstream tasks, including code summarization, variable name recovery, function name recovery, and similarity detection. Comprehensive experiments show that HexT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on four downstream tasks, and it demonstrates the robust effectiveness and generalizability of HexT5 for binary-related tasks.

Jiaqi Xiong

University of Science and Technology of China

Guoqiang Chen

University of Science and Technology of China

China

Kejiang Chen

University of Science and Technology of China

Han Gao

University of Science and Technology of China

China

Shaoyin Cheng

University of Science and Technology of China

China

Weiming Zhang

University of Science and Technology of China

China