Large language models (LLMs) can generate non-trivial programs, yet their reasoning often remains ungrounded: without external verification signals, one-shot generation may drift, repeat failure modes, or overfit to examples. We argue that the missing piece is budgeted feedback compression: turning noisy oracle outputs into compact, actionable hints that reliably drive multi-round code revision under tight context limits. We instantiate this idea in online judge (OJ) style algorithmic programming as a modular interactive agent that couples an LLM core with a sandboxed judger, a feedback-to-hint prompt constructor, and trajectory memory (optional error classifier). The key mechanism is feedback compression: converting noisy execution artifacts into compact, actionable hints within a tight prompt budget. In preliminary experiments, execution-grounded iteration improves debugging success from 83.9% (one-shot) to 93.2% on 570 real failed Codeforces submissions, and yields a clear difficulty trend in solving across 50 problems. Beyond OJ tasks, we envision budgeted oracle-to-hint compression as a general foundation for software engineering assistants that interact with continuous integration (CI) pipelines, tests, and profilers, shifting evaluation from final accuracy toward process metrics such as convergence and patch locality.
DCAware is proposed, a computationally efficient, non-iterative framework that prioritizes high signal-to-noise contextual grounding over multi-round repair and improving contextual quality is more effective than adding iterative repair complexity in the studied regression-oracle setting.
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.
Aofan Liu, Jing Meng, Fangxin Liu et al.· 0 citations
Spreadsheet applications are used by hundreds of millions worldwide, yet writing formulas remains a significant barrier. Existing approaches rely on static supervised data, which quickly saturates on limited annotations. In this paper, we introduce FORMULASPIN, a self-play framework that breaks the ceiling of supervised fine-tuning by enabling iterative self-improvement without any additional data. Vanilla SPIN fails on this task: it uniformly penalizes every non-matching output, so execution-equivalent alternatives are punished as negatives in one example while serving as ground truth in another, producing contradictory gradients. Our framework resolves this by exploiting formula generation's unique advantage: binary executability provides implicit supervision that separates semantic errors from valid stylistic variants. We frame training as a two-player game in which the main player learns to prefer ground-truth formulas over those from its previous version, while execution feedback sorts outputs into distinct granularities-enabling an adaptive curriculum that shifts from semantic correctness to stylistic refinement. To further increase accuracy, we incorporate ExecVote, a semantic-level voting mechanism that naturally handles multiple valid formulations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FORMULASPIN achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 74.9% exact match and 87.1% execution accuracy on NL2FORMULA, matching models trained with additional preference annotations while outperforming both traditional SFT and frontier proprietary models. These findings underscore self-play's potential to tackle scarce data tasks and open the door to extending it beyond executable domains.
Cy Xie· Annual Meeting of the Associ...· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance, but their robustness to realistic lexical corruption remains poorly understood. We evaluate four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models across four reasoning benchmarks under keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion. Character-level perturbations substantially degrade accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has little effect. We trace this asymmetry to Attention Diversion: lexical corruption fragments subword tokenization, and the resulting fragments attract disproportionate attention mass, concentrated in middle and final transformer layers. Length-matched controls confirm that fragmentation, not prompt length, drives the loss. A factorial intervention then shows why the damage is hard to undo: fragmentation corrupts token content and attention allocation together, and the two are coupled. Restoring clean attention while the content remains corrupted is actively harmful, restoring content alone is insufficient, and only restoring both recovers a substantial share of the gap. This coupling explains why inference-time strategies, including chain-of-thought prompting, spell-checking, self-repair, and stronger repair models, fail to consistently recover performance: each addresses one channel at a time. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Jiaqian-Janelle/Attention-Diversion
Jiaqi Zhu, Yang Zhang, Junhua Ding et al.· 0 citations
SCOPE is presented, a prover-initialized subgoal critic for code generation that adapts a Lean-oriented prover model to produce three parseable feedback fields for downstream code generation: subgoals, gap analysis, and a robustness checklist.
Yueke Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zihan Fang et al.· 0 citations