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When LLM Decompilers Recompile More and Preserve Less

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 4, 2026 · UTC

Decompilation recovers high-level source from compiled machine code and serves as a foundation for security tasks such as vulnerability detection and malware analysis. Traditional decompilers like Ghidra and Hex-Rays expose whatever they cannot resolve as visible placeholders and often emit pseudocode that will not compile or execute; LLM-based decompilers produce clean, idiomatic C and are now judged almost entirely by recompilability and re-executability: whether the output builds and passes its shipped input/output tests. We show that these metrics can reward the wrong path: a function may

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