Control flow graph based code optimization using graph neural networks

Selecting a good set of optimization flags requires extensive effort and expert input. While most of the prior research considers using static, spatial, or dynamic features, some of the latest research directly applied deep neural networks to source code. We combined the static features, spatial features, and deep neural networks by representing source code as graphs and trained Graph Neural Network for automatically finding suitable optimization flags. We created a dataset of 12000 graphs using 256 optimization flag combinations on 47 benchmarks. We trained and tested our model using these benchmarks, and our results show that we can achieve a maximum of 48.6% speed-up compared to the case where all optimization flags are enabled.

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Publication Details

Journal
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Published
2026-03-11
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2026.1731740
Primary Topic
Software Engineering Research
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Control flow graph based code optimization using graph neural networks

Melih Peker, Ozcan Ozturk
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Software Engineering Research
article

Control flow graph based code optimization using graph neural networks

Melih Peker, Ozcan Ozturk
article en

Abstract

Selecting a good set of optimization flags requires extensive effort and expert input. While most of the prior research considers using static, spatial, or dynamic features, some of the latest research directly applied deep neural networks to source code. We combined the static features, spatial features, and deep neural networks by representing source code as graphs and trained Graph Neural Network for automatically finding suitable optimization flags. We created a dataset of 12000 graphs using 256 optimization flag combinations on 47 benchmarks. We trained and tested our model using these benchmarks, and our results show that we can achieve a maximum of 48.6% speed-up compared to the case where all optimization flags are enabled.

Frontiers in Robotics and AIVol. 13
Sabancı Üniversitesi (TR), Bilkent University (TR)
Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu, Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi
Openalex Percentile: Top 45%
Software Engineering Research
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