@inproceedings{yang-etal-2026-sedev,
    title = "{S}e{D}ev: Structured Semantic Exploration for {LLM}-Driven Code Generation",
    author = "Yang, Ronghui  and
      Liu, Jie  and
      Zeng, Jiajie  and
      Wang, Jiexin  and
      Jiang, Jiuchuan  and
      An, Bo  and
      Cai, Yi  and
      Zhao, Mengchen",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1641/",
    pages = "35485--35512",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in automating code generation. Recent approaches that incorporate feedback refinement mechanisms into the generation process have further enhanced software generation quality. However, these methods can be characterized as single-path approaches, which suffer from insufficient exploration of the vast solution space, often causing even the most powerful models to get stuck in local optima and struggle to generate the desired software. Some other works use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore multiple paths for finding the best solution; yet, MCTS can be extremely inefficient in practice. To this end, we propose SeDev, a novel LLM-driven code generation framework that efficiently finds high-quality solutions in only a few iterations. The core idea of SeDev is to gradually explore semantically adjacent solutions through structured prompt guidance and feedback on previous trials, while using unit tests to evaluate the quality of exploration. To distill the exploration experience, SeDev incorporates a feedback synthesis module that translates unit test results within exploration into comprehensive suggestions. We construct a challenging feature oriented software benchmark FSD-bench++, along with two open datasets to evaluate. Experimental results show that SeDev outperforms baselines while maintaining reasonable time and computational costs. Code is available here."
}