Compiler bugs are extremely harmful, but are notoriously dicult to debug because compiler bugs usually produce few debugging information. Given a bug-triggering test program for a compiler, hundreds of compiler les are usually involved during compilation, and thus are suspect buggy les. Although there are lots of automated bug isolation techniques, they are not applicable to compilers due to the scalability or eectiveness problem. To solve this problem, in this paper, we transform the compiler bug isolation problem into a search problem, i.e., searching for a set of eective witness test programs that are able to eliminate innocent compiler les from suspects. Based on this intuition, we propose an automated compiler bug isolation technique, DiWi, which (1) proposes a heuristic-based search strategy to generate such a set of eective witness test programs via applying our designed witnessing mutation rules to the given failing test program, and (2) compares their coverage to isolate bugs following the practice of spectrum-based bug isolation. The experimental results on 90 real bugs from popular GCC and LLVM compilers show that DiWi eectively isolates 66.67%/78.89% bugs within Top-10/Top-20 compiler les, signicantly outperforming state-of-the-art bug isolation techniques. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.