Bridging the Gap between User Intent and LLM: A Requirement Alignment Approach for Code Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Jia, Bai, Ruiqi, Luo, Yangkang, Zhang, Yiran, Yang, Wentao, Sun, Zeyu, Zhao, Tiankuo, Jin, Dongming, Li, Lei, Jin, Zhi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Jia
Bai, Ruiqi
Luo, Yangkang
Zhang, Yiran
Yang, Wentao
Sun, Zeyu
Zhao, Tiankuo
Jin, Dongming
Li, Lei
Jin, Zhi
author_facet Li, Jia
Bai, Ruiqi
Luo, Yangkang
Zhang, Yiran
Yang, Wentao
Sun, Zeyu
Zhao, Tiankuo
Jin, Dongming
Li, Lei
Jin, Zhi
contents Code generation refers to automatically producing executable programs from user requirements. Recently, researchers have explored approaches to enhance the correctness of generated code with advanced large language models. Although achieving improvements, existing approaches focus on designing reasoning strategies or post-refinement methods to enhance code generation performance. Despite their differences, all these methods share a common assumption: the LLM can correctly understand the given requirement. However, this assumption does not always hold. To fill this gap, we propose REA-Coder, a requirement alignment approach to enhance the code generation performance of LLMs. REA-Coder involves first identifying the requirement content that does not align with LLMs and aligning the requirements. Then, based on the aligned requirements, LLMs generate code and further verify whether the generated code aligns with the requirements, iterating this process of requirement alignment and code generation until generating correct code or achieving the maximum number of iterations. Experimental results show that REA-Coder outperforms all advanced baselines on four LLMs across five programming benchmarks. Concretely, REA-Coder achieves average improvements of 7.93%, 30.25%, 26.75%, 8.59%, and 8.64% on the five benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of requirement alignment for improving the code generation performance of LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_16198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging the Gap between User Intent and LLM: A Requirement Alignment Approach for Code Generation
Li, Jia
Bai, Ruiqi
Luo, Yangkang
Zhang, Yiran
Yang, Wentao
Sun, Zeyu
Zhao, Tiankuo
Jin, Dongming
Li, Lei
Jin, Zhi
Software Engineering
Code generation refers to automatically producing executable programs from user requirements. Recently, researchers have explored approaches to enhance the correctness of generated code with advanced large language models. Although achieving improvements, existing approaches focus on designing reasoning strategies or post-refinement methods to enhance code generation performance. Despite their differences, all these methods share a common assumption: the LLM can correctly understand the given requirement. However, this assumption does not always hold. To fill this gap, we propose REA-Coder, a requirement alignment approach to enhance the code generation performance of LLMs. REA-Coder involves first identifying the requirement content that does not align with LLMs and aligning the requirements. Then, based on the aligned requirements, LLMs generate code and further verify whether the generated code aligns with the requirements, iterating this process of requirement alignment and code generation until generating correct code or achieving the maximum number of iterations. Experimental results show that REA-Coder outperforms all advanced baselines on four LLMs across five programming benchmarks. Concretely, REA-Coder achieves average improvements of 7.93%, 30.25%, 26.75%, 8.59%, and 8.64% on the five benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of requirement alignment for improving the code generation performance of LLMs.
title Bridging the Gap between User Intent and LLM: A Requirement Alignment Approach for Code Generation
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16198