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Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better

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arxiv 2207.14502 v4 pith:YYZDSVTL submitted 2022-07-29 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords problemsperformanceimproveinterpreterprogrammingsolutionscodecorrectness
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recent Language Models (LMs) achieve breakthrough performance in code generation when trained on human-authored problems, even solving some competitive-programming problems. Self-play has proven useful in games such as Go, and thus it is natural to ask whether LMs can generate their own instructive programming problems to improve their performance. We show that it is possible for an LM to synthesize programming problems and solutions, which are filtered for correctness by a Python interpreter. The LM's performance is then seen to improve when it is fine-tuned on its own synthetic problems and verified solutions; thus the model 'improves itself' using the Python interpreter. Problems are specified formally as programming puzzles [Schuster et al., 2021], a code-based problem format where solutions can easily be verified for correctness by execution. In experiments on publicly-available LMs, test accuracy more than doubles. This work demonstrates the potential for code LMs, with an interpreter, to generate instructive problems and improve their own performance.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 17 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents through Self-Play SWE-RL

    cs.SE 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Self-play RL on bug injection and repair in sandboxed repositories yields +10.4 and +7.8 point gains on SWE-bench Verified and Pro while outperforming human-data baselines.

  2. AR$^2$: Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Adversarial teacher-student RL on computationally equivalent narrative rewrites of coding problems yields modest but consistent pass@1 gains on competitive programming benchmarks.

  3. Dr. Boot: Bootstrapping Program Synthesis Language Models to Perform Repairing

    cs.SE 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A bootstrapping algorithm that trains program synthesis models on their own successful outputs and on repaired failures modestly improves pass@k over regular fine-tuning on MBPP, with mixed results on APPS.

  4. Self-Reasoning Language Models: Unfold Hidden Reasoning Chains with Few Reasoning Catalyst

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Self-Reasoning Language Models use 1,000 seed catalyst rationales to teach a model to expand its own reasoning chains and iteratively self-improve, gaining about 2.5 points on average across five benchmarks.

  5. Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A structured survey of LLM planning methods, benchmarks, and interpretability work, organized around a three-way taxonomy.

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