TRAVEL: Rule-Guided MCTS Plus RL Lifts C-to-Rust Translation Accuracy 26% and Cuts Unsafe Code 13% on Linux Kernel and Huawei Code

arXiv 2607.19966·medium signal

LLMs translating C to Rust reliably violate Rust-specific rules and lose semantics on complex code. TRAVEL steers Monte Carlo Tree Search along Rust rule constraints during reasoning-path construction, then applies RL coupling execution feedback with reasoning-quality signals. Against the strongest prompting baseline IRENE on xCodeEval it improves computational accuracy 26.22% and compilation success 18.77%; on Linux-kernel functions (OS-Bench) and an industrial Huawei dataset it adds 16.51% and 18.28% compilation success while cutting unsafe-block rate by roughly 13% on each — the unsafe-rate number is the one that matters for a memory-safety migration.