CollabCoder: Plan-Code Co-Evolution via Collaborative Decision-Making for Efficient Code Generation

Duy Tung Doan, Quang Huy Phung, Dzung Nguyen, Khac-Hoai Nam Bui


Abstract
Automated code generation remains a persistent challenge in software engineering, as conventional multi-agent frameworks are often constrained by static planning, isolated execution, high computational overhead, and limited adaptability to complex tasks. This paper introduces CollabCoder, a novel Plan-Code Co-Evolution framework that improves code generation through dynamic multi-agent collaboration. The core idea is to design a collaborative decision-making process between the plan module and the code module to decide which module should be executed for the debugging process. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that CollabCoder consistently improves code quality and robustness across tasks. Importantly, CollabCoder achieves performance comparable to or exceeding current state-of-the-art methods while reducing computational overhead, with efficiency gains becoming more pronounced as benchmark difficulty increases. On the more challenging LiveCodeBench and xCodeEval benchmarks, our approach improves performance by 11-20% over strong baselines while reducing the number of API calls by an average of 4-10 per execution.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1393
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
27964–27985
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1393/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Duy Tung Doan, Quang Huy Phung, Dzung Nguyen, and Khac-Hoai Nam Bui. 2026. CollabCoder: Plan-Code Co-Evolution via Collaborative Decision-Making for Efficient Code Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 27964–27985, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CollabCoder: Plan-Code Co-Evolution via Collaborative Decision-Making for Efficient Code Generation (Doan et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1393.pdf
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