Yu Zhang
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Yu Zhang (Southeast University), Yu Zhang (Harbin), Yu Zhang (Zhejiang), Yu Zhang (Oxford), Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang (SJTU), Yu Zhang, YU Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang (UIUC, Texas A&M), Yu Zhang (Harbin), Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Zhang
Unverified author pages with similar names: Yu Zhang
2026
ReCode: Reinforcing Code Generation with Reasoning-Process Rewards
Lishui Fan | Yu Zhang | Mouxiang Chen | Zhongxin Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lishui Fan | Yu Zhang | Mouxiang Chen | Zhongxin Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In practice, rigorous reasoning is often a key driver of correct code, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation often neglects optimizing reasoning quality. Bringing process-level supervision into RL is appealing, but it faces two challenges. First, training reliable reward models to assess reasoning quality is bottlenecked by the scarcity of fine-grained preference data. Second, naively incorporating such neural rewards may suffer from reward hacking. This work proposes ReCode(Reasoning-Reinforced Code Generation), a novel RL training framework comprising: (1) Contrastive Reasoning-Process Reward Learning (CRPL), which trains a reward model with synthesized optimized and degraded reasoning variants to assess the quality of reasoning process; and (2) Consistency-Gated GRPO (CG-GRPO), which integrates the reasoning-process reward model into RL by gating neural reasoning-process rewards with strict execution outcomes, using execution correctness as a hard gate to mitigate reward hacking. Additionally, to assess the reward model’s discriminative capability in assessing reasoning-process quality, we introduce LiveCodeBench-RewardBench (LCB-RB), a new benchmark comprising preference pairs of superior and inferior reasoning processes tailored for code generation. Experimental results across HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench show that a 7B model trained with ReCode outperforms the base version by 16.1% and reaches performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo. We further demonstrate the generalizability of ReCode by extending it to the math domain.