Sihao Wu
Author directory2026
TipCoder: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Test-time Instruction Proposer for Code Generation
Minyu Chen | Sihao Wu | Ling-I Wu | Song Qin | Jingyang Li | Lei Ning | Jianxin Xue | Guoqiang Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Minyu Chen | Sihao Wu | Ling-I Wu | Song Qin | Jingyang Li | Lei Ning | Jianxin Xue | Guoqiang Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Test-time scaling for code generation typically explores the solution space by sampling multiple programs from a fixed instruction. We study a complementary direction: instance-level instruction-space exploration. Our observation is that many coding failures stem from missing constraints, overlooked edge cases, or misleading reasoning paths induced by the original prompt. To address this, we propose TipCoder, a test-time instruction proposer that generates problem-specific auxiliary tips before code synthesis. TipCoder distills multi-turn debugging trajectories into proactive guidance and further optimizes the Proposer with reinforcement learning using a marginal-utility reward. At inference time, it generates both a base solution and a tip-guided solution, and applies a Reward Model for post-hoc selection. This exploration-selection design allows tips to expose additional candidate potential while reducing regressions from unnecessary guidance. Across multiple code-generation benchmarks and target Code LLMs, TipCoder provides a robust instruction-level test-time scaling strategy, comparing favorably with stochastic sampling and generic prompt optimization baselines under a shared reward-model-based selection protocol.