In plain words: Code-writing models are trained with rewards to use errors from running their own code, fixing answers over several tries instead of drawing fresh guesses. On competitive programming problems, it beat the previous best with both 8-billion and 70-billion-parameter models while needing ten times fewer guesses.
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) deployed as agents solve user-specified tasks over multiple steps while keeping the required manual engagement to a minimum. Crucially, such LLMs need to ground their generations in any feedback obtained to reliably achieve the desired outcomes. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning method for teaching models to leverage execution feedback in the realm of code synthesis, where state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to improve code iteratively compared to independent sampling. We benchmark on competitive programming tasks, where we achieve new state-of-the art results with both small (8B parameters) and large (70B) models while reducing the amount of samples required by an order of magnitude. Our analysis of inference-time behavior demonstrates that our method produces LLMs that effectively leverage automatic feedback over multiple steps.
Jonas Gehring, Kunhao Zheng, Jade Copet, Vegard Mella, Quentin Carbonneaux, Taco Cohen, Gabriel Synnaeve
arXiv:2410.02089 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Oct 2, 2024 · updated Feb 18, 2025
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