Towards Better Correctness and Efficiency in Code Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Feng, Yunlong, Xu, Yang, Xu, Xiao, Hui, Binyuan, Lin, Junyang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Feng, Yunlong
Xu, Yang
Xu, Xiao
Hui, Binyuan
Lin, Junyang
author_facet Feng, Yunlong
Xu, Yang
Xu, Xiao
Hui, Binyuan
Lin, Junyang
contents While code large language models have demonstrated remarkable progress in code generation, the generated code often exhibits poor runtime efficiency, limiting its practical application in performance-sensitive scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose an efficiency-oriented reinforcement learning framework guided by a novel performance reward. Based on this framework, we take a deeper dive into the code efficiency problem, identifying then proposing methods to overcome key bottlenecks: (1) Dynamic exploration overcomes the static data constraints of offline fine-tuning, enabling the discovery of more efficient code implementations. (2) The error-insensitive reinforcement learning method and high-contrast efficiency signals are crucial for mitigating systematic errors and achieving effective optimization. (3) Online exploration is most effective when starting from a high-correctness baseline, as this allows for efficiency improvements without sacrificing accuracy. With these discoveries, we finally propose a two-stage tuning method, which achieves high and balanced performance across correctness and efficiency. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of the method, which improves code correctness by 10.18\% and runtime efficiency by 7.75\% on a 7B model, achieving performance comparable to much larger model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Better Correctness and Efficiency in Code Generation
Feng, Yunlong
Xu, Yang
Xu, Xiao
Hui, Binyuan
Lin, Junyang
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
While code large language models have demonstrated remarkable progress in code generation, the generated code often exhibits poor runtime efficiency, limiting its practical application in performance-sensitive scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose an efficiency-oriented reinforcement learning framework guided by a novel performance reward. Based on this framework, we take a deeper dive into the code efficiency problem, identifying then proposing methods to overcome key bottlenecks: (1) Dynamic exploration overcomes the static data constraints of offline fine-tuning, enabling the discovery of more efficient code implementations. (2) The error-insensitive reinforcement learning method and high-contrast efficiency signals are crucial for mitigating systematic errors and achieving effective optimization. (3) Online exploration is most effective when starting from a high-correctness baseline, as this allows for efficiency improvements without sacrificing accuracy. With these discoveries, we finally propose a two-stage tuning method, which achieves high and balanced performance across correctness and efficiency. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of the method, which improves code correctness by 10.18\% and runtime efficiency by 7.75\% on a 7B model, achieving performance comparable to much larger model.
title Towards Better Correctness and Efficiency in Code Generation
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20124