Yu Zhang
Other people with similar names: Yu Zhang (Southeast University), Yu Zhang (Harbin), Yu Zhang (Zhejiang), Yu Zhang (Oxford), Yu Zhang (SJTU), Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang (UIUC, Texas A&M), Yu Zhang (Harbin), Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang
Unverified author pages with similar names: Yu Zhang
2026
ReCode: Reinforcing Code Generation with Reasoning-Process Rewards
Lishui Fan | Yu Zhang | Mouxiang Chen | Zhongxin Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lishui Fan | Yu Zhang | Mouxiang Chen | Zhongxin Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In practice, rigorous reasoning is often a key driver of correct code, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation often neglects optimizing reasoning quality. Bringing process-level supervision into RL is appealing, but it faces two challenges. First, training reliable reward models to assess reasoning quality is bottlenecked by the scarcity of fine-grained preference data. Second, naively incorporating such neural rewards may suffer from reward hacking. This work proposes ReCode(Reasoning-Reinforced Code Generation), a novel RL training framework comprising: (1) Contrastive Reasoning-Process Reward Learning (CRPL), which trains a reward model with synthesized optimized and degraded reasoning variants to assess the quality of reasoning process; and (2) Consistency-Gated GRPO (CG-GRPO), which integrates the reasoning-process reward model into RL by gating neural reasoning-process rewards with strict execution outcomes, using execution correctness as a hard gate to mitigate reward hacking. Additionally, to assess the reward model’s discriminative capability in assessing reasoning-process quality, we introduce LiveCodeBench-RewardBench (LCB-RB), a new benchmark comprising preference pairs of superior and inferior reasoning processes tailored for code generation. Experimental results across HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench show that a 7B model trained with ReCode outperforms the base version by 16.1% and reaches performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo. We further demonstrate the generalizability of ReCode by extending it to the math domain.