ACECODER: Acing Coder RL via Automated Test-Case Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces ACECODER, a method that uses automated test-case synthesis and reinforcement learning to significantly improve code generation models, demonstrating notable performance gains across multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

We propose a novel pipeline for automated test-case synthesis and reward modeling to enhance reinforcement learning in code models, achieving state-of-the-art improvements.

Findings

10-point improvement for Llama-3.1-8B-Ins

5-point improvement for Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Ins

Over 25% improvement on HumanEval-plus

Abstract

Most progress in recent coder models has been driven by supervised fine-tuning (SFT), while the potential of reinforcement learning (RL) remains largely unexplored, primarily due to the lack of reliable reward data/model in the code domain. In this paper, we address this challenge by leveraging automated large-scale test-case synthesis to enhance code model training. Specifically, we design a pipeline that generates extensive (question, test-cases) pairs from existing code data. Using these test cases, we construct preference pairs based on pass rates over sampled programs to train reward models with Bradley-Terry loss. It shows an average of 10-point improvement for Llama-3.1-8B-Ins and 5-point improvement for Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Ins through best-of-32 sampling, making the 7B model on par with 236B DeepSeek-V2.5. Furthermore, we conduct reinforcement learning with both reward models and test-case pass rewards, leading to consistent improvements across HumanEval, MBPP, BigCodeBench, and LiveCodeBench (V4). Notably, we follow the R1-style training to start from Qwen2.5-Coder-base directly and show that our RL training can improve model on HumanEval-plus by over 25\% and MBPP-plus by 6\% for merely 80 optimization steps. We believe our results highlight the huge potential of reinforcement learning in coder models.