Adversarial Agent Collaboration for Correctness Improvements of C to Safe Rust Translation
Translating C to memory-safe languages, like Rust, prevents critical memory safety vulnerabilities that are prevalent in legacy C software. Even with recent LLM-based and tool-augmented translators, the resulting Rust code frequently diverges from the C source on inputs absent from the test suite used during translation; this correctness gap on unseen inputs remains a dominant obstacle to reliable, automatic C-to-Rust translation. In this work, we present ACToR (Adversarial C To Rust), a simple LLM-agent loop that closes this gap by adversarially searching for inputs on which the translation diverges from the C source, and using them to drive subsequent refinements. Inspired by GANs, ACToR pits a translator agent against a discriminator agent that collaborate to iteratively refine the Rust translation. On each iteration, the translator agent synthesizes and refines a Rust translation to pass an existing suite of tests, and then the discriminator agent finds new failing tests by constructing and refining a differential fuzzer over the C and Rust binaries. Across 63 real-world command-line C utilities, with an average size of 473 lines of code and the longest reaching thousands of lines in size, ACToR achieves over 90% test pass rate with zero human intervention. The improvement holds across seven agent-LLM configurations on our micro-benchmark, indicating that the loop is largely independent of the choice of underlying translator and LLM. Compared to a non-adversarial, coverage-driven test-generation baseline, ACToR improves correctness by up to 36.7%. When applied on top of one recent translator, C2SaferRust, ACToR further improves the validation pass rate by 16.6%.