StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback
Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
Abstract
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled the field of code generation. Previous work integrated reinforcement learning (RL) with compiler feedback for exploring the output space of LLMs to enhance code generation quality. However, the lengthy code generated by LLMs in response to complex human requirements makes RL exploration a challenge. Also, since the unit tests may not cover the complicated code, optimizing LLMs by using these unexecuted code snippets is ineffective. To tackle these challenges, we introduce StepCoder, a novel RL framework for code generation, consisting of two main components: CCCS addresses the exploration challenge by breaking the long sequences code generation task into a Curriculum of Code Completion Subtasks, while FGO only optimizes the model by masking the unexecuted code segments to provide Fine-Grained Optimization. In addition, we furthermore construct the APPS+ dataset for RL training, which is manually verified to ensure the correctness of unit tests. Experimental results show that our method improves the ability to explore the output space and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks. The code and dataset will be made available upon publication.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.251
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4571–4585
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.251
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.251
- Cite (ACL):
- Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, and Xuanjing Huang. 2024. StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4571–4585, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (Dou et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/autopr/2024.acl-long.251.pdf