RepairFormer Fixes Corrupted JSON, INI, and DOT Files at 97.57% Repair Rate With 5x Faster Runtime Than Prior Work

arXiv 2608.05060·low signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Malformed structured inputs — JSON, DOT, OBJ, INI, S-expressions, TinyC — break parsers and interrupt testing, deployment, and downstream automation even when most content is intact, and existing repair tools tend to rely on deletion or repeated search, losing content or producing semantically wrong output. RepairFormer treats repair as supervised sequence generation with format tags, oracle validation, and boundary-localized repair that focuses generation on the detected fault region, which shrinks the effective input and supports longer files. It reports 88% repair and 94% recovery in the main evaluation, and 97.57% repair with 94.29% recovery at roughly 5x the speed of the state of the art on the authors' benchmark.