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ATGen: Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Test Case Generation

Software Engineering 2025-10-17 v1

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, yet their outputs often contain subtle bugs, for which effective test cases are a critical bottleneck. Existing test generation methods, whether based on prompting or supervised fine-tuning, rely on static datasets. This imposes a ``fixed-difficulty ceiling'', fundamentally limiting their ability to uncover novel or more complex bugs beyond their training scope. To overcome this, we introduce ATGen, a framework that trains a test case generator via adversarial reinforcement learning. ATGen pits a test generator against an adversarial code generator that continuously crafts harder bugs to evade the current policy. This dynamic loop creates a curriculum of increasing difficulty challenging current policy. The test generator is optimized via Reinforcement Learning (RL) to jointly maximize ``Output Accuracy'' and ``Attack Success'', enabling it to learn a progressively stronger policy that breaks the fixed-difficulty ceiling of static training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ATGen significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We further validate its practical utility, showing it serves as both a more effective filter for Best-of-N inference and a higher-quality reward source for training code generation models. Our work establishes a new, dynamic paradigm for improving the reliability of LLM-generated code.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.14635,
  title  = {ATGen: Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Test Case Generation},
  author = {Qingyao Li and Xinyi Dai and Weiwen Liu and Xiangyang Li and Yasheng Wang and Ruiming Tang and Yong Yu and Weinan Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14635},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:41:14.441Z