English

APRIL: API Synthesis with Automatic Prompt Optimization and Reinforcement Learning

Software Engineering 2025-10-01 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Programming Languages

Abstract

APIs are central to modern software development, yet composing new APIs from large libraries is difficult due to the exponential search space; traditional component-based synthesis relies on costly exploration and hand-crafted specifications. While large language models (LLMs) can generate implementations from natural language, hallucinations and limited access to up-to-date contextual information often yield incorrect code. In this paper, we present APRIL, an approach that combines LLM-based synthesis with Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR): APO iteratively refines prompts for a frozen model, while RLVR fine-tunes the policy toward functional correctness, producing an efficient synthesis pipeline. Evaluated on 81 real-world APIs from widely used scientific Python libraries and benchmarked against instruction-tuned but unfine-tuned LLMs guided by expert prompts, APRIL achieves substantial improvements. These results indicate that integrating APO and RLVR provides a robust, scalable path for component-based API synthesis in large libraries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.25196,
  title  = {APRIL: API Synthesis with Automatic Prompt Optimization and Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Hua Zhong and Shan Jiang and Sarfraz Khurshid},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25196},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:05:30.078Z