ChatGPT as a Java Decompiler

AbstractWe propose a novel approach using instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, to automatically decompile entire Java classes. Our method relies only on a textual representation of the Java bytecode and corresponding unit tests generated from the bytecode. While no additional domain knowledge or fine-tuning is performed, we provide a single training example of this decompilation process in the model’s prompt. To overcome both compilation errors and test failures, we use an iterative prompting approach. We find that ChatGPT-4 is able to generate more human-readable output than existing software-based decompilers while achieving slightly lower pass rates on unit tests. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/BradMcDanel/gpt-java-decompiler.