CodeRise: Bootstrapping LLMs for Ultra Low-Resource Programming Languages via Progressive Self-Refinement Curriculum

Tengfei Wen, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Xiaoliang Cong, Le Sun


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with code generation for Ultra Low-Resource Programming Languages (ULRPLs) due to the scarcity of training data. Existing synthetic data generation methods fail in this context, suffering from a severe cold-start problem and resulting in samples that lack diversity. To overcome these challenges, we propose CodeRise, a novel two-stage framework that autonomously generates a high-quality, diverse, and progressively complex curriculum for ULRPLs. The framework first tackles the cold-start and distribution issues by leveraging the full formal syntax of the target language as structural guidance and applying a biased sampling strategy over library modules. Building on this foundation, we fine-tune the model to generate increasingly complex code without explicit syntax input, using an adaptive curriculum and multi-turn self-debugging to progressively improve code quality.We evaluate on two ULRPLs, Tengo and Janet, using migrated HumanEval-Tengo and MBPP-Tengo, as well as our new benchmarks, TengoEval and JanetEval. Experiments show that CodeRise significantly outperforms both training-free and training-based baselines in ultra low-resource environments.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1840
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
36929–36942
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1840/
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Cite (ACL):
Tengfei Wen, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Xiaoliang Cong, and Le Sun. 2026. CodeRise: Bootstrapping LLMs for Ultra Low-Resource Programming Languages via Progressive Self-Refinement Curriculum. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 36929–36942, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CodeRise: Bootstrapping LLMs for Ultra Low-Resource Programming Languages via Progressive Self-Refinement Curriculum (Wen et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1840.pdf
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