Self-evolution methods enhance code generation through iterative ”generate-verify-refine” cycles, yet existing approaches suffer from low exploration efficiency, failing to discover algorithmically superior solutions within limited budgets. We identify the root cause as the lack of systematic controllability: execution feedback is not reliably converted into targeted search decisions across route planning, edit granularity, and experience reuse. We propose Controlled Self-Evolution (CSE), a framework that couples three components into an integrated control architecture. Diversified Planning Initialization provides route diversity through structurally distinct algorithmic strategies. Modular Evolution provides feedback attribution and module-level editing by decomposing programs into functional modules and applying targeted mutation and compositional crossover. Hierarchical Evolution Memory maintains search state within tasks and distills reusable optimization patterns across tasks. Experiments on EffiBench-X demonstrate that CSE consistently outperforms all baselines across various LLM backbones. Further analysis reveals non-additive synergy among control layers, confirming that CSE’s effectiveness arises from component coupling rather than independent contributions. The code and evaluation implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/EvoControl.

Although large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive world knowledge and some reasoning abilities, their proficiency in generating humorous sentences remains a challenge. Previous research has demonstrated that the humor generation capabilities of ChatGPT are confined to producing merely 25 unique jokes. In this work, we concentrate on endowing LLMs with the ability of generating puns, a particular category of humor by preference learning method. We propose a multi-stage curriculum preference learning framework to optimize both pun structure preferences and humor preferences. Specifically, we improve the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm to address the challenge of multi-objective alignment problem. Besides, to facilitate further advancement in this field, we collect a Chinese Pun (ChinesePun) dataset, containing 2.1k puns and corresponding annotations. Experimental results on both Chinese and English benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all the baseline models.

Topic relevance of an essay demands that the composition adheres to a clear theme and aligns well with the essay prompt requirements, a critical aspect of essay quality evaluation. However, existing research of Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) for Chinese essays has overlooked topic relevance and lacks detailed feedback, while Automatic Essay Comment Generation (AECG) faces much complexity and difficulty. Additionally, current Large Language Models, including GPT-4, often make incorrect judgments and provide overly impractical feedback when evaluating topic relevance. This paper introduces TOREE (Topic Relevance Evaluation), a comprehensive dataset developed to assess topic relevance in Chinese primary and middle school students’ essays, which is beneficial for AES, AECG and other applications. Moreover, our proposed two-step method utilizes TOREE through a combination of Supervised Fine-tuning and Preference Learning. Experimental results demonstrate that TOREE is of high quality, and our method significantly enhances models’ performance on two designed tasks for topic relevance evaluation, improving both automatic and human evaluations across four diverse LLMs.