Yiru Dong, Richong Zhang, Fanshuang Kong +1cs.SE cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) have made notable progress in code generation, but they still struggle on challenging tasks that require sophisticated algorithms or complex implementations. Recent methods increasingly use code execution as feedback, especially in self-correction pipelines that construct verification signals from generated code. However, these pipelines often depend on supervision signals whose reliability is unknown, which can introduce misleading feedback, unnecessary revisions, and incorrect final answers. To address this issue, we propose ExeCRE, an Execution-Consistency guided code Reliability Estimation framework. Instead of judging candidate code by tests or LLM feedback, ExeCRE estimates code reliability by statistically analyzing consistency patterns in execution outputs over a large number of randomly generated inputs. It collects execution outputs over generated inputs, projects them into consistency signals, and applies the Dawid-Skene model to infer latent code reliability. We integrate ExeCRE into self-correction for code generation. Experiments show that ExeCRE consistently improves both effectiveness and stability, while substantially reducing misleading correction signals. Under GPT-5.2 on LiveCodeBench, the average number of misleading feedback cases on already correct code drops from 113.2 with a representative self-correction baseline to 14.0 with ExeCRE. As an additional study, we apply the same reliability estimation strategy to code-based mathematical reasoning and observe similar benefits. These results suggest that ExeCRE enables more reliable use of generated code in execution-based pipelines.
Multi-turn code agents rely on execution feedback to repair incorrect programs, yet standard reinforcement learning paradigms optimize and evaluate policy performance primarily using single-shot outcome rewards. This misalignment conflates initial code generation with feedback-driven refinement, discards granular execution signals across intermediate turns, and fails to evaluate whether the policy actually acquires self-repair capabilities. We propose Test-aware Policy Refinement (TaPR), a framework that transforms execution feedback into a dense per-turn test-pass-ratio reward under a consistent multi-turn interaction protocol. Across six models on 219 code-generation problems from LiveCodeBench, TaPR improves the pooled three-turn success rate (Pass@3) by 2.44 percentage points. In the predefined 7B/8B high-headroom slice, pooled accuracy increases from 30.25% to 33.56% (+3.31 pp), with 42 improvements and 13 regressions in paired trials. On a matched Qwen3-8B ablation, the dense reward supplies nonzero feedback in all of the first ten steps and reaches a higher Hard-subset peak than outcome-only GRPO within the tested budget, although GRPO nearly matches pooled Pass@3 by step 300. Our primary contribution is a reward-decomposition framework and a turn-aware evaluation protocol that decouple first-shot generation quality from multi-turn repair competence.
Code models are increasingly trained with execution feedback, but most training signals still stop at correctness. This leaves an important gap for systems code: two programs can pass the same tests while differing greatly in runtime. We study how to train code agents to prefer faster correct implementations, rather than treating efficiency only as an evaluation metric. The key difficulty is that runtime is a fragile reward. It is meaningful only after a program is correct, varies across tasks, and gives little guidance when most sampled programs fail to compile or run. We propose \textbf{RLPF}, reinforcement learning from performance feedback, which turns execution outcomes into a staged reward. Failed programs are ordered by execution progress, while correct programs are ranked by their relative improvement from the baseline toward the expert reference. This gives useful feedback before correctness and performance-sensitive feedback after correctness. Fine-tuning Qwen3-32B with RLPF on PerfCodeBench raises correct-and-runnable solutions from $11.1\%$ to $54.6\%$ and improves relative efficiency from $8.1\%$ to $38.6\%$. The trained model becomes competitive with stronger open-weight systems, and its optimization behavior transfers modestly to EffiBench-X. Additional studies show that model-generated references provide useful but weaker supervision, and that the full composite reward is more reliable than correctness-only or runtime-only baselines. These results suggest that code agents can be trained not only to pass tests, but also to optimize the programs they write.
Coding agents increasingly operate in executable environments where a failed attempt produces actionable feedback rather than merely an incorrect answer. Existing cost-aware systems typically treat such failures as cascade decisions: try a cheap model first, then escalate hard cases to a stronger and more expensive model. In coding, however, execution feedback can also make further cheap-model recovery worthwhile, raising a budgeted deployment question: when should an agent spend more cheap compute, and when should it escalate? We formulate this post-failure decision as recovery routing over heterogeneous actions and train a supervised router from execution rollouts. To make the same router usable under changing budgets, we add a Conformal Risk Control (CRC) layer that selects a deployment-time cost penalty without retraining and provides marginal expected-cost control under exchangeability. Across held-out failures from five coding benchmarks, cheap recovery and escalation exhibit complementary success patterns. The calibrated frontier improves over fixed actions, prompt-only routers, and a binary cascade baseline; in the main GPT-5.4-nano/GPT-5.4 setting, one CRC-calibrated frontier point exceeds always-escalate solve rate while using 35% of its mean recovery cost. Code is available at https://github.com/Qijia-He/agent-budget-control.
Large Language Models have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, most existing evaluations focus only on single-attempt accuracy and overlook the iterative refinement process that is central to real-world programming. This study presents a systematic investigation of LLMs' ability to rectify their own code through execution feedback. Using real-world programming problems across four models and two major programming languages, this study evaluates performance using iterative refinement framework where LLMs receive compiler error messages and testcase feedback after each attempt. This study introduces metrics to evaluate code failures, analyze rectification patterns, and compare the effectiveness of reasoning and non-reasoning models, offering actionable insights into both the understanding and practical application of feedback loops in LLM-driven code generation systems. Results show that reasoning models consistently improve over iterations, substantially outperforming non-reasoning models in leveraging feedback, while syntactic and runtime errors are far more tractable than logical or algorithmic failures.
Kun Cheng, Songshuo Lu, Sicong Liao +7cs.CV cs.CL cs.LG
Native GPU kernel generation turns high-level tensor programs into executable, efficient low-level code. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with this task, while execution-based reinforcement learning suffers from sparse rewards, reward hacking, and training instability. We present MusaCoder, a full-stack training framework for native GPU kernel generation on CUDA and MUSA backends. MusaCoder combines progressive kernel-oriented data synthesis, diversity-preserving rejection fine-tuning, and execution-feedback Reinforcement Learning (RL) through MooreEval, a distributed verifier and reward environment. To stabilize RL, MusaCoder introduces PrimeEcho for first-turn-anchored multi-turn rewards, Buffered Dynamic Retry for recovering signals from all-failed hard samples, and MirrorPop for off-policy sequence filtering. Experiments on KernelBench and a MUSA-ported variant show that MusaCoder outperforms strong open-source and proprietary baselines in both correctness and empirical speedup, with the 9B model matching or exceeding frontier closed-source models and the 27B model establishing a new state of the art. These results demonstrate not only the effectiveness of full-stack execution-feedback training for native kernel generation, but also the capability of Moore Threads GPUs to support the complete LLM post-training stack, providing a practical foundation for large-model training and optimization on emerging accelerators.