Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs

Dayu Yang, Tianyang Liu, Daoan Zhang, Antoine Simoulin, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Xin Qian, Grey Yang, Jiebo Luo, Julian McAuley


Abstract
Code and reasoning recently exhibit a mutually reinforcing relationship in large language models (LLMs): Code is abstract, modular, highly structured and has strong logic, guiding reasoning in training and inference. While reasoning translates high-level goals into small executable steps, enable more sophisticated code intellignece, solving real-world challenging software development problems. In this study, we examine how code serves as a structured medium for enhancing reasoning - providing verifiable execution paths, enforcing logical decomposition, and enabling runtime validation, and how advances in reasoning have transformed code intelligence from basic completion to sophisticated agent - enabling models to tackle complex software engineering tasks through deliberate planning and systematic debugging. Finally, we identify key challenges and propose future research directions may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.130
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2586–2616
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.130/
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Cite (ACL):
Dayu Yang, Tianyang Liu, Daoan Zhang, Antoine Simoulin, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Xin Qian, Grey Yang, Jiebo Luo, and Julian McAuley. 2025. Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2586–2616, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs (Yang et al., EMNLP 2025)
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