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Existing code reasoning methods primarily supervise final code outputs, ignoring intermediate states, often leading to reward hacking where correct answers are obtained through inconsistent reasoning. We propose StepCodeReasoner, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hao Wang , Rui Li , Lei Sha , Jie M. Zhang

Preference learning extends the performance of Code LLMs beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. In existing approaches, a set of n candidate solutions is evaluated based on test case success…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jie Wu , Haoling Li , Xin Zhang , Xiao Liu , Yangyu Huang , Jianwen Luo , Yizhen Zhang , Zuchao Li , Ruihang Chu , Yujiu Yang , Scarlett Li

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLM), reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal technique for code generation and optimization in various domains. This paper presents a systematic survey of the application of…

Refactoring is a software engineering practice that aims to improve code quality without altering program behavior. Although automated refactoring tools have been extensively studied, their practical applicability remains limited. Recent…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Alessandro Midolo , Emiliano Tramontana , Massimiliano Di Penta

Automatic prompt optimization is an important approach to improving the performance of large language models (LLMs). Recent research demonstrates the potential of using LLMs as prompt optimizers, which can generate improved task prompts via…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Xinyu Tang , Xiaolei Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Siyuan Lu , Yaliang Li , Ji-Rong Wen

Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Wenfeng Feng , Penghong Zhao , Guochao Jiang , Chuzhan Hao , Yuewei Zhang , Guohua Liu , Hao Wang

A prerequisite for coding agents to perform tasks on large repositories is code localization - the identification of relevant files, classes, and functions to work on. While repository-level code localization has been performed using…

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Biruk Asmare Muse , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

In real-world software engineering tasks, solving a problem often requires understanding and modifying multiple functions, classes, and files across a large codebase. Therefore, on the repository level, it is crucial to extract the relevant…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Jicheng Wang , Yifeng He , Hao Chen

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been commonly used to align the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Recently, a popular alternative is Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which replaces an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Runsheng Yu , Yong Wang , Xiaoqi Jiao , Youzhi Zhang , James T. Kwok

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in code generation recently, offering programmers revolutionary assistance in software development. However, due to the auto-regressive nature of LLMs, they are susceptible…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Xue Jiang , Yihong Dong , Yongding Tao , Huanyu Liu , Zhi Jin , Wenpin Jiao , Ge Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in automatic code generation by improving coding efficiency to a certain extent. However, generating high-quality and reliable code remains a formidable task because of LLMs' lack of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiaoxue Ren , Xinyuan Ye , Dehai Zhao , Zhenchang Xing , Xiaohu Yang

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Jiaqian Liu , Kenneth Addo , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni , Zhe Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Jianqing Zhang , Zhezheng Hao , Wei Xia , Hande Dong , Hong Wang , Chenxing Wei , Yuyan Zhou , Yubin Qi , Qiang Lin , Jian Cao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

Instruction fine-tuning has conventionally been employed to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to a variety of tasks. Nonetheless, this technique often necessitates substantial computational resources, making it impractical for deployment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Zhenting Qi , Xiaoyu Tan , Shaojie Shi , Chao Qu , Yinghui Xu , Yuan Qi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Large language models frequently exhibit suboptimal performance on low resource languages, primarily due to inefficient subword segmentation and systemic training data imbalances. In this paper, we propose Variable Entropy Policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Chonghan Liu , Yimin Du , Qi An , Xin He , Cunqi Zhai , Fei Tan , Weijia Lin , Xiaochun Gong , Yongchao Deng , Shousheng Jia , Xiangzheng Zhang

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Isabella Ferreira , Lawrence Arkoh , Anderson Uchôa , Ana Carla Bibiano , Alessandro Garcia , Wesley K. G. Assunção

Refactoring is a practice widely adopted during software maintenance and evolution. Due to its importance, there is extensive work on the effectiveness of refactoring in achieving code quality. However, developer's intentions are usually…