Jane Luo
Author directory2026
X-Coder: Advancing Competitive Programming with Fully Synthetic Tasks, Solutions, and Tests
Jie Wu | Haoling Li | Xin Zhang | Jiani Guo | Jane Luo | Xuewei Yang | Steven Liu | Yangyu Huang | Ruihang Chu | Scarlett Li | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jie Wu | Haoling Li | Xin Zhang | Jiani Guo | Jane Luo | Xuewei Yang | Steven Liu | Yangyu Huang | Ruihang Chu | Scarlett Li | Yujiu Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Competitive programming remains challenging for code LLMs. Despite recent progress, many training pipelines still depend on scarce real-world data, raising concerns about scalability and near-duplicate benchmark contamination. In this paper, we examine whether synthetic training artifacts can support the complete SFT-to-RL cycle for competitive programming: no real-world tasks, solutions, or test cases are directly used for post-training. To this end, we synthesize tasks, verified solutions, and reliable test cases that serve as reward signals for reinforcement learning. To improve reward reliability, we introduce a dual-verification strategy that reduces noise in both selected solutions and test outputs. Using this high-quality data, we train the X-Coder model series. X-Coder-14B achieves 67.5% avg@8 on LiveCodeBench v5 and 63.4% on v6, outperforming its base model by over 40 points. Further analysis provides practical insights into synthetic post-training, highlighting the value of diverse tasks, verified long-CoT supervision, and code-centric reinforcement. Our data and models are released at https://github.com/JieWu02/X-Coder.