Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning for Sound and Adversarial Test Generation in Code LLMs

arXiv:2609.03955 · cs.CL, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-03 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-03

Updated: 2026-09-03

Comments: 21 pages, 7 figures. Accepted to Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially advanced code generation with large language models (LLMs) through executable feedback.

Terminology

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially advanced code generation with large language models (LLMs) through executable feedback. The feedback for coding problems mainly comes from specific test cases, where high-quality test cases are often scarce since they should be both sound and discriminative. We thus turn to study the auto-generation of test cases using the learned model. We find this is naturally an adversarial RL problem: the model is expected to generate effective test cases as counterexamples, depending on the solver's current failure modes. We propose Test Cases Scaling (TCS), a two-stage RL framework for effective test generation. Both stages train a test generator from a rolling policy-aligned buffer: Stage 1 generates tests consistent with the reference solution, and Stage 2 restricts the buffer to current failure modes and learns counterexample tests. Across TACO and LiveCodeBench, TCS improves both pass@1 and inference-time answer selection according to generated tests. We find the learned test generator also enables effective selection among other LLM outputs.

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