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May 12

JanusCoder: Towards a Foundational Visual-Programmatic Interface for Code Intelligence

The scope of neural code intelligence is rapidly expanding beyond text-based source code to encompass the rich visual outputs that programs generate. This visual dimension is critical for advanced applications like flexible content generation and precise, program-driven editing of visualizations. However, progress has been impeded by the scarcity of high-quality multimodal code data, a bottleneck stemming from challenges in synthesis and quality assessment. To address these challenges, we make contributions from both a data and modeling perspective. We first introduce a complete synthesis toolkit that leverages reciprocal synergies between data modalities to efficiently produce a large-scale, high-quality corpus spanning from standard charts to complex interactive web UIs and code-driven animations. Leveraging this toolkit, we construct JanusCode-800K, the largest multimodal code corpus to date. This powers the training of our models, JanusCoder and JanusCoderV, which establish a visual-programmatic interface for generating code from textual instructions, visual inputs, or a combination of both. Our unified model is a departure from existing approaches that build specialized models for isolated tasks. Extensive experiments on both text-centric and vision-centric coding tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the JanusCoder series, with our 7B to 14B scale models approaching or even exceeding the performance of commercial models. Furthermore, extensive analysis provides key insights into harmonizing programmatic logic with its visual expression. Our code and checkpoints will are available at https://github.com/InternLM/JanusCoder.

internlm Intern Large Models
·
Oct 27, 2025 1

CodeTree: Agent-guided Tree Search for Code Generation with Large Language Models

Pre-trained on massive amounts of code and text data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable achievements in performing code generation tasks. With additional execution-based feedback, these models can act as agents with capabilities to self-refine and improve generated code autonomously. However, on challenging coding tasks with extremely large search space, current agentic approaches still struggle with multi-stage planning, generating, and debugging. To address this problem, we propose CodeTree, a framework for LLM agents to efficiently explore the search space in different stages of the code generation process. Specifically, we adopted a unified tree structure to explicitly explore different coding strategies, generate corresponding coding solutions, and subsequently refine the solutions. In each stage, critical decision-making (ranking, termination, expanding) of the exploration process is guided by both the environmental execution-based feedback and LLM-agent-generated feedback. We comprehensively evaluated CodeTree on 7 code generation benchmarks and demonstrated the significant performance gains of CodeTree against strong baselines. Using GPT-4o as the base model, we consistently achieved top results of 95.1 on HumanEval, 98.7 on MBPP, and 43.0 on CodeContests. On the challenging SWEBench benchmark, our approach led to significant performance gains.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024

UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation

Pre-trained models for programming languages have recently demonstrated great success on code intelligence. To support both code-related understanding and generation tasks, recent works attempt to pre-train unified encoder-decoder models. However, such encoder-decoder framework is sub-optimal for auto-regressive tasks, especially code completion that requires a decoder-only manner for efficient inference. In this paper, we present UniXcoder, a unified cross-modal pre-trained model for programming language. The model utilizes mask attention matrices with prefix adapters to control the behavior of the model and leverages cross-modal contents like AST and code comment to enhance code representation. To encode AST that is represented as a tree in parallel, we propose a one-to-one mapping method to transform AST in a sequence structure that retains all structural information from the tree. Furthermore, we propose to utilize multi-modal contents to learn representation of code fragment with contrastive learning, and then align representations among programming languages using a cross-modal generation task. We evaluate UniXcoder on five code-related tasks over nine datasets. To further evaluate the performance of code fragment representation, we also construct a dataset for a new task, called zero-shot code-to-code search. Results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on most tasks and analysis reveals that comment and AST can both enhance UniXcoder.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 7, 2022

Improved Iterative Refinement for Chart-to-Code Generation via Structured Instruction

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 15, 2025 2

CoCo: Code as CoT for Text-to-Image Preview and Rare Concept Generation

Recent advancements in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have significantly advanced text-to-image (T2I) generation, particularly through the integration of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, existing CoT-based T2I methods largely rely on abstract natural-language planning, which lacks the precision required for complex spatial layouts, structured visual elements, and dense textual content. In this work, we propose CoCo (Code-as-CoT), a code-driven reasoning framework that represents the reasoning process as executable code, enabling explicit and verifiable intermediate planning for image generation. Given a text prompt, CoCo first generates executable code that specifies the structural layout of the scene, which is then executed in a sandboxed environment to render a deterministic draft image. The model subsequently refines this draft through fine-grained image editing to produce the final high-fidelity result. To support this training paradigm, we construct CoCo-10K, a curated dataset containing structured draft-final image pairs designed to teach both structured draft construction and corrective visual refinement. Empirical evaluations on StructT2IBench, OneIG-Bench, and LongText-Bench show that CoCo achieves improvements of +68.83%, +54.8%, and +41.23% over direct generation, while also outperforming other generation methods empowered by CoT. These results demonstrate that executable code is an effective and reliable reasoning paradigm for precise, controllable, and structured text-to-image generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/micky-li-hd/CoCo

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 9 2

Unlocking the Latent Canvas: Eliciting and Benchmarking Symbolic Visual Expression in LLMs

Current multimodal approaches predominantly treat visual generation as an external process, relying on pixel rendering or code execution, thereby overlooking the native visual representation capabilities latent within Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we unlock this potential through ASCII art, a compact, efficient, and text-native visual format. We introduce SVE-ASCII, a unified framework designed to elicit and benchmark Symbolic Visual Expression directly within the pure text space. To address the scarcity of systematic resources, we construct ASCIIArt-7K, a high-quality dataset synthesized via a novel "Seed-and-Evolve" pipeline that augments human-curated anchors through in-context stylistic editing. We further implement a unified instruction-tuning strategy that jointly optimizes for both Generation (Text-to-ASCII) and Understanding (ASCII-to-Text). Crucially, our experiments reveal a critical phenomenon regarding task duality: while it is established that perception aids generation, we provide compelling evidence that generative training significantly enhances visual comprehension. This confirms a mutually reinforcing cycle in symbolic visual processing, a relationship previously hypothesized but rarely empirically demonstrated in the visual domain. We release our dataset, the ASCIIArt-Bench benchmark, and the SVE-ASCII model, establishing a robust baseline for native text-based visual intelligence.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 14

Web2Code: A Large-scale Webpage-to-Code Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive success across modalities such as image, video, and audio in a variety of understanding and generation tasks. However, current MLLMs are surprisingly poor at understanding webpage screenshots and generating their corresponding HTML code. To address this problem, we propose Web2Code, a benchmark consisting of a new large-scale webpage-to-code dataset for instruction tuning and an evaluation framework for the webpage understanding and HTML code translation abilities of MLLMs. For dataset construction, we leverage pretrained LLMs to enhance existing webpage-to-code datasets as well as generate a diverse pool of new webpages rendered into images. Specifically, the inputs are webpage images and instructions, while the responses are the webpage's HTML code. We further include diverse natural language QA pairs about the webpage content in the responses to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the web content. To evaluate model performance in these tasks, we develop an evaluation framework for testing MLLMs' abilities in webpage understanding and web-to-code generation. Extensive experiments show that our proposed dataset is beneficial not only to our proposed tasks but also in the general visual domain, while previous datasets result in worse performance. We hope our work will contribute to the development of general MLLMs suitable for web-based content generation and task automation. Our data and code will be available at https://github.com/MBZUAI-LLM/web2code.

  • 17 authors
·
Jun 28, 2024

mEOL: Training-Free Instruction-Guided Multimodal Embedder for Vector Graphics and Image Retrieval

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) function both as visual images and as structured code that encode rich geometric and layout information, yet most methods rasterize them and discard this symbolic organization. At the same time, recent sentence embedding methods produce strong text representations but do not naturally extend to visual or structured modalities. We propose a training-free, instruction-guided multimodal embedding framework that uses a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to map text, raster images, and SVG code into an aligned embedding space. We control the direction of embeddings through modality-specific instructions and structural SVG cues, eliminating the need for learned projection heads or contrastive training. Our method has two key components: (1) Multimodal Explicit One-word Limitation (mEOL), which instructs the MLLM to summarize any multimodal input into a single token whose hidden state serves as a compact semantic embedding. (2) A semantic SVG rewriting module that assigns meaningful identifiers and simplifies nested SVG elements through visual reasoning over the rendered image, exposing geometric and relational cues hidden in raw code. Using a repurposed VGBench, we build the first text-to-SVG retrieval benchmark and show that our training-free embeddings outperform encoder-based and training-based multimodal baselines. These results highlight prompt-level control as an effective alternative to parameter-level training for structure-aware multimodal retrieval. Project page: https://scene-the-ella.github.io/meol/

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 18

ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in chart understanding tasks. However, interpreting charts with textual descriptions often leads to information loss, as it fails to fully capture the dense information embedded in charts. In contrast, parsing charts into code provides lossless representations that can effectively contain all critical details. Although existing open-source MLLMs have achieved success in chart understanding tasks, they still face two major challenges when applied to chart-to-code tasks.: (1) Low executability and poor restoration of chart details in the generated code and (2) Lack of large-scale and diverse training data. To address these challenges, we propose ChartCoder, the first dedicated chart-to-code MLLM, which leverages Code LLMs as the language backbone to enhance the executability of the generated code. Furthermore, we introduce Chart2Code-160k, the first large-scale and diverse dataset for chart-to-code generation, and propose the Snippet-of-Thought (SoT) method, which transforms direct chart-to-code generation data into step-by-step generation. Experiments demonstrate that ChartCoder, with only 7B parameters, surpasses existing open-source MLLMs on chart-to-code benchmarks, achieving superior chart restoration and code excitability. Our code will be available at https://github.com/thunlp/ChartCoder.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 11, 2025

ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agents

Automating the transformation of user interface (UI) designs into front-end code holds significant promise for accelerating software development and democratizing design workflows. While recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated progress in text-to-code generation, many existing approaches rely solely on natural language prompts, limiting their effectiveness in capturing spatial layout and visual design intent. In contrast, UI development in practice is inherently multimodal, often starting from visual sketches or mockups. To address this gap, we introduce a modular multi-agent framework that performs UI-to-code generation in three interpretable stages: grounding, planning, and generation. The grounding agent uses a vision-language model to detect and label UI components, the planning agent constructs a hierarchical layout using front-end engineering priors, and the generation agent produces HTML/CSS code via adaptive prompt-based synthesis. This design improves robustness, interpretability, and fidelity over end-to-end black-box methods. Furthermore, we extend the framework into a scalable data engine that automatically produces large-scale image-code pairs. Using these synthetic examples, we fine-tune and reinforce an open-source VLM, yielding notable gains in UI understanding and code quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout accuracy, structural coherence, and code correctness. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/leigest519/ScreenCoder.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025 4

MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

Natural language image-caption datasets, widely used for training Large Multimodal Models, mainly focus on natural scenarios and overlook the intricate details of mathematical figures that are critical for problem-solving, hindering the advancement of current LMMs in multimodal mathematical reasoning. To this end, we propose leveraging code as supervision for cross-modal alignment, since code inherently encodes all information needed to generate corresponding figures, establishing a precise connection between the two modalities. Specifically, we co-develop our image-to-code model and dataset with model-in-the-loop approach, resulting in an image-to-code model, FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M dataset, the largest image-code dataset to date. Furthermore, we utilize FigCodifier to synthesize novel mathematical figures and then construct MM-MathInstruct-3M, a high-quality multimodal math instruction fine-tuning dataset. Finally, we present MathCoder-VL, trained with ImgCode-8.6M for cross-modal alignment and subsequently fine-tuned on MM-MathInstruct-3M for multimodal math problem solving. Our model achieves a new open-source SOTA across all six metrics. Notably, it surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. The dataset and models will be released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder.

  • 11 authors
·
May 15, 2025 2

Rethinking Repetition Problems of LLMs in Code Generation

With the advent of neural language models, the performance of code generation has been significantly boosted. However, the problem of repetitions during the generation process continues to linger. Previous work has primarily focused on content repetition, which is merely a fraction of the broader repetition problem in code generation. A more prevalent and challenging problem is structural repetition. In structural repetition, the repeated code appears in various patterns but possesses a fixed structure, which can be inherently reflected in grammar. In this paper, we formally define structural repetition and propose an efficient decoding approach called RPG, which stands for Repetition Penalization based on Grammar, to alleviate the repetition problems in code generation for LLMs. Specifically, RPG first leverages grammar rules to identify repetition problems during code generation, and then strategically decays the likelihood of critical tokens that contribute to repetitions, thereby mitigating them in code generation. To facilitate this study, we construct a new dataset CodeRepetEval to comprehensively evaluate approaches for mitigating the repetition problems in code generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RPG substantially outperforms the best-performing baselines on CodeRepetEval dataset as well as HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks, effectively reducing repetitions and enhancing the quality of generated code.

  • 5 authors
·
May 15, 2025

SwitchGPT: Adapting Large Language Models for Non-Text Outputs

Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily trained on text-based datasets, exhibit exceptional proficiencies in understanding and executing complex linguistic instructions via text outputs. However, they falter when requests to generate non-text ones. Concurrently, modality conversion models, such as text-to-image, despite generating high-quality images, suffer from a lack of extensive textual pretraining. As a result, these models are only capable of accommodating specific image descriptions rather than comprehending more complex instructions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach, \methodname, from a modality conversion perspective that evolves a text-based LLM into a multi-modal one. We specifically employ a minimal dataset to instruct LLMs to recognize the intended output modality as directed by the instructions. Consequently, the adapted LLM can effectively summon various off-the-shelf modality conversion models from the model zoos to generate non-text responses. This circumvents the necessity for complicated pretraining that typically requires immense quantities of paired multi-modal data, while simultaneously inheriting the extensive knowledge of LLMs and the ability of high-quality generative models. To evaluate and compare the adapted multi-modal LLM with its traditional counterparts, we have constructed a multi-modal instruction benchmark that solicits diverse modality outputs. The experiment results reveal that, with minimal training, LLMs can be conveniently adapted to comprehend requests for non-text responses, thus achieving higher flexibility in multi-modal scenarios. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/xinke-wang/SwitchGPT.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Breaking the SFT Plateau: Multimodal Structured Reinforcement Learning for Chart-to-Code Generation

While reinforcement learning (RL) has proven highly effective for general reasoning in vision-language models, its application to tasks requiring in-depth understanding of information-rich images and generation of structured outputs remains underexplored. Chart-to-code generation exemplifies this challenge, demanding complex reasoning over visual charts to generate structured code. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone is often insufficient, highlighting the need for effective RL strategies that appropriately reward structured outputs. We systematically investigate the performance plateau in SFT through large-scale experiments and propose Multimodal Structured Reinforcement Learning (MSRL) for chart-to-code generation, which substantially breaks through this plateau. We construct the largest training corpus to date, containing 3 million chart-code pairs from real-world arXiv tables to mitigate simplistic patterns of prior synthetic data. Despite reaching state-of-the-art performance, our experiments show that scaling SFT data eventually hits a plateau where further increases yield negligible improvements. Our MSRL method leverages a multi-granularity structured reward system using multimodal textual and visual feedback. At the textual level, rule-based rewards validate fine-grained code details. At the visual level, model-based rewards assess structural similarity by rendering generated code into images and employing an evaluator model. We implement this within a two-stage curriculum for training stability. Results demonstrate that MSRL significantly breaks the SFT plateau, improving high-level metrics by 6.2% and 9.9% on ChartMimic and ReachQA benchmarks respectively, achieving competitive performance with advanced closed-source models.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

AutoP2C: An LLM-Based Agent Framework for Code Repository Generation from Multimodal Content in Academic Papers

Machine Learning (ML) research is spread through academic papers featuring rich multimodal content, including text, diagrams, and tabular results. However, translating these multimodal elements into executable code remains a challenging and time-consuming process that requires substantial ML expertise. We introduce ``Paper-to-Code'' (P2C), a novel task that transforms the multimodal content of scientific publications into fully executable code repositories, which extends beyond the existing formulation of code generation that merely converts textual descriptions into isolated code snippets. To automate the P2C process, we propose AutoP2C, a multi-agent framework based on large language models that processes both textual and visual content from research papers to generate complete code repositories. Specifically, AutoP2C contains four stages: (1) repository blueprint extraction from established codebases, (2) multimodal content parsing that integrates information from text, equations, and figures, (3) hierarchical task decomposition for structured code generation, and (4) iterative feedback-driven debugging to ensure functionality and performance. Evaluation on a benchmark of eight research papers demonstrates the effectiveness of AutoP2C, which can successfully generate executable code repositories for all eight papers, while OpenAI-o1 or DeepSeek-R1 can only produce runnable code for one paper. The code is available at https://github.com/shoushouyu/Automated-Paper-to-Code.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025

VCode: a Multimodal Coding Benchmark with SVG as Symbolic Visual Representation

Code has emerged as a precise and executable medium for reasoning and action in the agent era. Yet, progress has largely focused on language-centric tasks such as program synthesis and debugging, leaving visual-centric coding underexplored. Inspired by how humans reason over sketches, we advocate SVG code as a compact, interpretable, and executable visual representation. We introduce VCode, a benchmark that reframes multimodal understanding as code generation: given an image, a model must produce SVG that preserves symbolic meaning for downstream reasoning. VCode covers three domains - general commonsense (MM-Vet), professional disciplines (MMMU), and visual-centric perception (CV-Bench). To assess symbolic fidelity, we propose CodeVQA, a novel evaluation protocol in which a policy model answers questions over rendered SVGs; correct answers indicate faithful symbolic preservation. Empirically, frontier VLMs struggle to generate faithful SVGs, revealing a persistent gap between language-centric and visual-centric coding. To close this gap, we introduce VCoder, an agentic framework that augments VLMs along two axes: (i) Thinking with Revision, which iteratively analyzes discrepancies and refines SVG code; and (ii) Acting with Visual Tools, where detectors and parsers supply structured cues such as objects, shapes, and text beyond the model's intrinsic capacity. Across benchmarks, frontier VLMs with strong reasoning capabilities score well overall yet remain limited in professional knowledge and 3D reasoning. VCoder delivers a 12.3-point overall gain over the top-performing Claude-4-Opus. Human studies show that both humans and VLMs perform worse on rendered SVGs, their consistency reveals the promise of symbolic visual representation. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/CSU-JPG/VCode.

CSU-JPG Jinpeng Group
·
Nov 4, 2025 4

CodeOCR: On the Effectiveness of Vision Language Models in Code Understanding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in source code understanding, yet as software systems grow in scale, computational efficiency has become a critical bottleneck. Currently, these models rely on a text-based paradigm that treats source code as a linear sequence of tokens, which leads to a linear increase in context length and associated computational costs. The rapid advancement of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) introduces an opportunity to optimize efficiency by representing source code as rendered images. Unlike text, which is difficult to compress without losing semantic meaning, the image modality is inherently suitable for compression. By adjusting resolution, images can be scaled to a fraction of their original token cost while remaining recognizable to vision-capable models. To explore the feasibility of this approach, we conduct the first systematic study on the effectiveness of MLLMs for code understanding. Our experiments reveal that: (1) MLLMs can effectively understand code with substantial token reduction, achieving up to 8x compression; (2) MLLMs can effectively leverage visual cues such as syntax highlighting, improving code completion performance under 4x compression; and (3) Code-understanding tasks like clone detection exhibit exceptional resilience to visual compression, with some compression ratios even slightly outperforming raw text inputs. Our findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of MLLMs in code understanding, which points out a shift toward image-modality code representation as a pathway to more efficient inference.

WebGen-R1: Incentivizing Large Language Models to Generate Functional and Aesthetic Websites with Reinforcement Learning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at function-level code generation, project-level tasks such as generating functional and visually aesthetic multi-page websites remain highly challenging. Existing works are often limited to single-page static websites, while agentic frameworks typically rely on multi-turn execution with proprietary models, leading to substantial token costs, high latency, and brittle integration. Training a small LLM end-to-end with reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising alternative, yet it faces a critical bottleneck in designing reliable and computationally feasible rewards for website generation. Unlike single-file coding tasks that can be verified by unit tests, website generation requires evaluating inherently subjective aesthetics, cross-page interactions, and functional correctness. To this end, we propose WebGen-R1, an end-to-end RL framework tailored for project-level website generation. We first introduce a scaffold-driven structured generation paradigm that constrains the large open-ended action space and preserves architectural integrity. We then design a novel cascaded multimodal reward that seamlessly couples structural guarantees with execution-grounded functional feedback and vision-based aesthetic supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our WebGen-R1 substantially transforms a 7B base model from generating nearly nonfunctional websites into producing deployable, aesthetically aligned multi-page websites. Remarkably, our WebGen-R1 not only consistently outperforms heavily scaled open-source models (up to 72B), but also rivals the state-of-the-art DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in functional success, while substantially exceeding it in valid rendering and aesthetic alignment. These results position WebGen-R1 as a viable path for scaling small open models from function-level code generation to project-level web application generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 21 2

Thinking with Programming Vision: Towards a Unified View for Thinking with Images

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that think with images can interactively use tools to reason about visual inputs, but current approaches often rely on a narrow set of tools with limited real-world necessity and scalability. In this work, we first reveal a critical and previously overlooked weakness: even state-of-the-art MLLMs are surprisingly brittle, showing significant performance degradation on images with simple orientation changes or natural corruptions, underscoring the need for more robust tool-based reasoning. To address this, we propose CodeVision, a flexible and scalable code-as-tool framework where the model generates code as a universal interface to invoke any image operation, moving beyond fixed tool registries. We train our model using a two-stage methodology, beginning with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a high-quality dataset curated for complex, multi-turn tool composition and error recovery, followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel and dense process reward function to encourage strategic and efficient tool use. To facilitate this research, we construct new SFT and RL datasets and introduce a challenging new benchmark suite designed to rigorously evaluate robustness to orientation changes and multi-tool reasoning. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL series show that our approach significantly improves model performance and fosters emergent capabilities such as flexible tool composition, efficient chained execution, and robust error recovery from runtime feedback. Code is available at https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/CodeVision.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025 1

Execution Guided Line-by-Line Code Generation

We present a novel approach to neural code generation that incorporates real-time execution signals into the language model generation process. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation capabilities, they typically do not utilize execution feedback during inference, a critical signal that human programmers regularly leverage. Our method, Execution-Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (EG-CFG), dynamically incorporates execution signals as the model generates code, providing line-by-line feedback that guides the generation process toward executable solutions. EG-CFG employs a multi-stage process: first, we conduct beam search to sample candidate program completions for each line; second, we extract execution signals by executing these candidates against test cases; and finally, we incorporate these signals into the prompt during generation. By maintaining consistent signals across tokens within the same line and refreshing signals at line boundaries, our approach provides coherent guidance while preserving syntactic structure. Moreover, the method naturally supports native parallelism at the task level in which multiple agents operate in parallel, exploring diverse reasoning paths and collectively generating a broad set of candidate solutions. Our experiments across diverse coding tasks demonstrate that EG-CFG significantly improves code generation performance compared to standard approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results across various levels of complexity, from foundational problems to challenging competitive programming and data science tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/boazlavon/eg_cfg

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025

Omni-I2C: A Holistic Benchmark for High-Fidelity Image-to-Code Generation

We present Omni-I2C, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in converting complex, structured digital graphics into executable code. We argue that this task represents a non-trivial challenge for the current generation of LMMs: it demands an unprecedented synergy between high-fidelity visual perception -- to parse intricate spatial hierarchies and symbolic details -- and precise generative expression -- to synthesize syntactically sound and logically consistent code. Unlike traditional descriptive tasks, Omni-I2C requires a holistic understanding where any minor perceptual hallucination or coding error leads to a complete failure in visual reconstruction. Omni-I2C features 1080 meticulously curated samples, defined by its breadth across subjects, image modalities, and programming languages. By incorporating authentic user-sourced cases, the benchmark spans a vast spectrum of digital content -- from scientific visualizations to complex symbolic notations -- each paired with executable reference code. To complement this diversity, our evaluation framework provides necessary depth; by decoupling performance into perceptual fidelity and symbolic precision, it transcends surface-level accuracy to expose the granular structural failures and reasoning bottlenecks of current LMMs. Our evaluation reveals a substantial performance gap among leading LMMs; even state-of-the-art models struggle to preserve structural integrity in complex scenarios, underscoring that multimodal code generation remains a formidable challenge. Data and code are available at https://github.com/MiliLab/Omni-I2C.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 20

From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models

We introduce Chart2Code, a new benchmark for evaluating the chart understanding and code generation capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). Chart2Code is explicitly designed from a user-driven perspective, capturing diverse real-world scenarios and progressively increasing task difficulty. It consists of three levels: Level 1 (Chart Reproduction) reproduces charts from a reference figure and user query; Level 2 (Chart Editing) involves complex modifications such as changing chart types or adding elements; and Level 3 (Long-Table to Chart Generation) requires models to transform long, information-dense tables into faithful charts following user instructions. To our knowledge, this is the first hierarchical benchmark that reflects practical chart2code usage while systematically scaling task complexity. In total, Chart2Code contains 2,023 tasks across 22 chart types, paired with multi-level evaluation metrics that assess both code correctness and the visual fidelity of rendered charts. We benchmark 25 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LMMs, including both proprietary and the latest open-source models such as GPT-5, Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL3/3.5, MiMo-VL, and Seed-1.6-VL. Experimental results demonstrate that even the SoTA model GPT-5 averages only 0.57 on code-based evaluation and 0.22 on chart-quality assessment across the editing tasks, underscoring the difficulty of Chart2Code. We anticipate this benchmark will drive advances in multimodal reasoning and foster the development of more robust and general-purpose LMMs. Our code and data are available on Chart2Code.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025 2

Reasoning Distillation and Structural Alignment for Improved Code Generation

Effective code generation with language models hinges on two critical factors: accurately understanding the intent of the prompt and generating code that applies algorithmic reasoning to produce correct solutions capable of passing diverse test cases while adhering to the syntax of the target programming language. Unlike other language tasks, code generation requires more than accurate token prediction; it demands comprehension of solution-level and structural relationships rather than merely generating the most likely tokens. very large language model (VLLM) are capable of generating detailed steps toward the correct solution of complex tasks where reasoning is crucial in solving the problem. Such reasoning capabilities may be absent in smaller language models. Therefore, in this work, we distill the reasoning capabilities of a VLLM into a smaller, more efficient model that is faster and cheaper to deploy. Our approach trains the model to emulate the reasoning and problem-solving abilities of the VLLM by learning to identify correct solution pathways and establishing a structural correspondence between problem definitions and potential solutions through a novel method of structure-aware loss optimization. This enables the model to transcend token-level generation and to deeply grasp the overarching structure of solutions for given problems. Experimental results show that our fine-tuned model, developed through a cheap and simple to implement process, significantly outperforms our baseline model in terms of pass@1, average data flow, and average syntax match metrics across the MBPP, MBPP Plus, and HumanEval benchmarks.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025

Design2Code: How Far Are We From Automating Front-End Engineering?

Generative AI has made rapid advancements in recent years, achieving unprecedented capabilities in multimodal understanding and code generation. This can enable a new paradigm of front-end development, in which multimodal LLMs might directly convert visual designs into code implementations. In this work, we formalize this as a Design2Code task and conduct comprehensive benchmarking. Specifically, we manually curate a benchmark of 484 diverse real-world webpages as test cases and develop a set of automatic evaluation metrics to assess how well current multimodal LLMs can generate the code implementations that directly render into the given reference webpages, given the screenshots as input. We also complement automatic metrics with comprehensive human evaluations. We develop a suite of multimodal prompting methods and show their effectiveness on GPT-4V and Gemini Pro Vision. We further finetune an open-source Design2Code-18B model that successfully matches the performance of Gemini Pro Vision. Both human evaluation and automatic metrics show that GPT-4V performs the best on this task compared to other models. Moreover, annotators think GPT-4V generated webpages can replace the original reference webpages in 49% of cases in terms of visual appearance and content; and perhaps surprisingly, in 64% of cases GPT-4V generated webpages are considered better than the original reference webpages. Our fine-grained break-down metrics indicate that open-source models mostly lag in recalling visual elements from the input webpages and in generating correct layout designs, while aspects like text content and coloring can be drastically improved with proper finetuning.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 5, 2024 2

CodeBoost: Boosting Code LLMs by Squeezing Knowledge from Code Snippets with RL

Code large language models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for building efficient and automated coding pipelines. Existing models are typically post-trained using reinforcement learning (RL) from general-purpose LLMs using "human instruction-final answer" pairs, where the instructions are usually from manual annotations. However, collecting high-quality coding instructions is both labor-intensive and difficult to scale. On the other hand, code snippets are abundantly available from various sources. This imbalance presents a major bottleneck in instruction-based post-training. We propose CodeBoost, a post-training framework that enhances code LLMs purely from code snippets, without relying on human-annotated instructions. CodeBoost introduces the following key components: (1) maximum-clique curation, which selects a representative and diverse training corpus from code; (2) bi-directional prediction, which enables the model to learn from both forward and backward prediction objectives; (3) error-aware prediction, which incorporates learning signals from both correct and incorrect outputs; (4) heterogeneous augmentation, which diversifies the training distribution to enrich code semantics; and (5) heterogeneous rewarding, which guides model learning through multiple reward types including format correctness and execution feedback from both successes and failures. Extensive experiments across several code LLMs and benchmarks verify that CodeBoost consistently improves performance, demonstrating its effectiveness as a scalable and effective training pipeline.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 7, 2025

Liquid: Language Models are Scalable Multi-modal Generators

We present Liquid, an auto-regressive generation paradigm that seamlessly integrates visual comprehension and generation by tokenizing images into discrete codes and learning these code embeddings alongside text tokens within a shared feature space for both vision and language. Unlike previous multimodal large language model (MLLM), Liquid achieves this integration using a single large language model (LLM), eliminating the need for external pretrained visual embeddings such as CLIP. For the first time, Liquid uncovers a scaling law that performance drop unavoidably brought by the unified training of visual and language tasks diminishes as the model size increases. Furthermore, the unified token space enables visual generation and comprehension tasks to mutually enhance each other, effectively removing the typical interference seen in earlier models. We show that existing LLMs can serve as strong foundations for Liquid, saving 100x in training costs while outperforming Chameleon in multimodal capabilities and maintaining language performance comparable to mainstream LLMs like LLAMA2. Liquid also outperforms models like SD v2.1 and SD-XL (FID of 5.47 on MJHQ-30K), excelling in both vision-language and text-only tasks. This work demonstrates that LLMs such as LLAMA3.2 and GEMMA2 are powerful multimodal generators, offering a scalable solution for enhancing both vision-language understanding and generation. The code and models will be released.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024 1

Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation

Existing large language model-based code generation pipelines typically use beam search or sampling algorithms during the decoding process. Although the programs they generate achieve high token-matching-based scores, they often fail to compile or generate incorrect outputs. The main reason is that conventional Transformer decoding algorithms may not be the best choice for code generation. In this work, we propose a novel Transformer decoding algorithm, Planning-Guided Transformer Decoding (PG-TD), that uses a planning algorithm to do lookahead search and guide the Transformer to generate better programs. Specifically, instead of simply optimizing the likelihood of the generated sequences, the Transformer makes use of a planner to generate candidate programs and test them on public test cases. The Transformer can therefore make more informed decisions and generate tokens that will eventually lead to higher-quality programs. We also design a mechanism that shares information between the Transformer and the planner to make our algorithm computationally efficient. We empirically evaluate our framework with several large language models as backbones on public coding challenge benchmarks, showing that 1) it can generate programs that consistently achieve higher performance compared with competing baseline methods; 2) it enables controllable code generation, such as concise codes and highly-commented codes by optimizing modified objective.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 9, 2023

ArtifactsBench: Bridging the Visual-Interactive Gap in LLM Code Generation Evaluation

The generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding from static code to dynamic, interactive visual artifacts. This progress is bottlenecked by a critical evaluation gap: established benchmarks focus on algorithmic correctness and are blind to the visual fidelity and interactive integrity that define modern user experiences. To bridge this gap, we introduce ArtifactsBench, a new benchmark and paradigm for the automated, multimodal evaluation of visual code generation. Our framework programmatically renders each generated artifact and captures its dynamic behavior through temporal screenshots. This visual evidence, alongside the source code, is then assessed by a Multimodal LLM (MLLM)-as-Judge, which is rigorously guided by a fine-grained, per-task checklist to ensure holistic and reproducible scoring. We construct a new benchmark of 1,825 diverse tasks and evaluate over 30 leading LLMs. Our automated evaluation achieves a striking 94.4% ranking consistency with WebDev Arena, the gold-standard for human preference in web development, and over 90% pairwise agreement with human experts. This establishes ArtifactsBench as the first framework to reliably automate the assessment of human-perceived quality at scale. Our analysis provides a high-resolution map of the current SOTA, revealing that generalist models often outperform domain-specific ones. We open-source ArtifactsBench, including the benchmark, evaluation harness, and baseline results at https://artifactsbenchmark.github.io/, to provide the community with a scalable and accurate tool to accelerate the development of user-centric generative models.

  • 32 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 1

ChartMimic: Evaluating LMM's Cross-Modal Reasoning Capability via Chart-to-Code Generation

We introduce a new benchmark, ChartMimic, aimed at assessing the visually-grounded code generation capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). ChartMimic utilizes information-intensive visual charts and textual instructions as inputs, requiring LMMs to generate the corresponding code for chart rendering. ChartMimic includes 1,000 human-curated (figure, instruction, code) triplets, which represent the authentic chart use cases found in scientific papers across various domains(e.g., Physics, Computer Science, Economics, etc). These charts span 18 regular types and 4 advanced types, diversifying into 191 subcategories. Furthermore, we propose multi-level evaluation metrics to provide an automatic and thorough assessment of the output code and the rendered charts. Unlike existing code generation benchmarks, ChartMimic places emphasis on evaluating LMMs' capacity to harmonize a blend of cognitive capabilities, encompassing visual understanding, code generation, and cross-modal reasoning. The evaluation of 3 proprietary models and 11 open-weight models highlights the substantial challenges posed by ChartMimic. Even the advanced GPT-4V, Claude-3-opus only achieve an average score of 73.2 and 53.7, respectively, indicating significant room for improvement. We anticipate that ChartMimic will inspire the development of LMMs, advancing the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024 2

CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation

Pre-trained models for Natural Languages (NL) like BERT and GPT have been recently shown to transfer well to Programming Languages (PL) and largely benefit a broad set of code-related tasks. Despite their success, most current methods either rely on an encoder-only (or decoder-only) pre-training that is suboptimal for generation (resp. understanding) tasks or process the code snippet in the same way as NL, neglecting the special characteristics of PL such as token types. We present CodeT5, a unified pre-trained encoder-decoder Transformer model that better leverages the code semantics conveyed from the developer-assigned identifiers. Our model employs a unified framework to seamlessly support both code understanding and generation tasks and allows for multi-task learning. Besides, we propose a novel identifier-aware pre-training task that enables the model to distinguish which code tokens are identifiers and to recover them when they are masked. Furthermore, we propose to exploit the user-written code comments with a bimodal dual generation task for better NL-PL alignment. Comprehensive experiments show that CodeT5 significantly outperforms prior methods on understanding tasks such as code defect detection and clone detection, and generation tasks across various directions including PL-NL, NL-PL, and PL-PL. Further analysis reveals that our model can better capture semantic information from code. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https: //github.com/salesforce/CodeT5 .

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 2, 2021

Mario: Multimodal Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for multimodal reasoning. Yet, most existing methods still rely on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to encode image-text pairs in isolation, ignoring the relational structure that real-world multimodal data naturally form. This motivates reasoning on multimodal graphs (MMGs), where each node has textual and visual attributes and edges provide structural cues. Enabling LLM-based reasoning on such heterogeneous multimodal signals while preserving graph topology introduces two key challenges: resolving weak cross-modal consistency and handling heterogeneous modality preference. To address this, we propose Mario, a unified framework that simultaneously resolves the two above challenges and enables effective LLM-based reasoning over MMGs. Mario consists of two innovative stages. Firstly, a graph-conditioned VLM design that jointly refines textual and visual features through fine-grained cross-modal contrastive learning guided by graph topology. Secondly, a modality-adaptive graph instruction tuning mechanism that organizes aligned multimodal features into graph-aware instruction views and employs a learnable router to surface, for each node and its neighborhood, the most informative modality configuration to the LLM. Extensive experiments across diverse MMG benchmarks demonstrate that Mario consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph models in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios for node classification and link prediction. The code will be made available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/Mario.

Scaling Language-Centric Omnimodal Representation Learning

Recent multimodal embedding approaches leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) fine-tuned with contrastive learning (CL) have shown promising results, yet the underlying reasons behind their superiority remain underexplored. This work argues that a crucial advantage of MLLM-based approaches stems from implicit cross-modal alignment achieved during generative pretraining, where the language decoder learns to exploit multimodal signals within a shared representation space for generating unimodal outputs. Through analysis of anisotropy and kernel similarity structure, we empirically confirm that latent alignment emerges within MLLM representations, allowing CL to serve as a lightweight refinement stage. Leveraging this insight, we propose a Language-Centric Omnimodal Embedding framework, termed LCO-Emb. Extensive experiments across diverse backbones and benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance across modalities. Furthermore, we identify a Generation-Representation Scaling Law (GRSL), showing that the representational capabilities gained through contrastive refinement scales positively with the MLLM's generative capabilities. This suggests that improving generative abilities evolves as an effective paradigm for enhancing representation quality. We provide a theoretical explanation of GRSL, which formally links the MLLM's generative quality to the upper bound on its representation performance, and validate it on a challenging, low-resource visual-document retrieval task, showing that continual generative pretraining before CL can further enhance the potential of a model's embedding capabilities. Codes, models, and resources are available at https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/LCO-Embedding.

Alibaba-DAMO-Academy DAMO Academy
·
Oct 13, 2025 4

IRCoder: Intermediate Representations Make Language Models Robust Multilingual Code Generators

Code understanding and generation have fast become some of the most popular applications of language models (LMs). Nonetheless, research on multilingual aspects of Code-LMs (i.e., LMs for code generation) such as cross-lingual transfer between different programming languages, language-specific data augmentation, and post-hoc LM adaptation, alongside exploitation of data sources other than the original textual content, has been much sparser than for their natural language counterparts. In particular, most mainstream Code-LMs have been pre-trained on source code files alone. In this work, we investigate the prospect of leveraging readily available compiler intermediate representations (IR) - shared across programming languages - to improve the multilingual capabilities of Code-LMs and facilitate cross-lingual transfer. To this end, we first compile SLTrans, a parallel dataset consisting of nearly 4M self-contained source code files coupled with respective intermediate representations. Next, starting from various base Code-LMs (ranging in size from 1.1B to 7.3B parameters), we carry out continued causal language modelling training on SLTrans, forcing the Code-LMs to (1) learn the IR language and (2) align the IR constructs with respective constructs of various programming languages. Our resulting models, dubbed IRCoder, display sizeable and consistent gains across a wide variety of code generation tasks and metrics, including prompt robustness, multilingual code completion, code understanding, and instruction following.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 6, 2024

ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Models

With the rise of multimodal applications, instruction data has become critical for training multimodal language models capable of understanding complex image-based queries. Existing practices rely on powerful but costly large language models (LLMs) or multimodal language models (MLMs) to produce instruction data. These are often prone to hallucinations, licensing issues and the generation process is often hard to scale and interpret. In this work, we present a programmatic approach that employs scene graphs as symbolic representations of images and human-written programs to systematically synthesize vision-centric instruction data. Our approach ensures the interpretability and controllability of the data generation process and scales efficiently while maintaining factual accuracy. By implementing a suite of 24 single-image, 14 multi-image instruction generators, and a scene graph generation pipeline, we build a scalable, cost-effective system: ProVision which produces diverse question-answer pairs concerning objects, attributes, relations, depth, etc., for any given image. Applied to Visual Genome and DataComp datasets, we generate over 10 million instruction data points, ProVision-10M, and leverage them in both pretraining and instruction tuning stages of MLMs. When adopted in the instruction tuning stage, our single-image instruction data yields up to a 7% improvement on the 2D split and 8% on the 3D split of CVBench, along with a 3% increase in performance on QBench2, RealWorldQA, and MMMU. Our multi-image instruction data leads to an 8% improvement on Mantis-Eval. Incorporation of our data in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages of xGen-MM-4B leads to an averaged improvement of 1.6% across 11 benchmarks.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024

REF-VLM: Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm for Unified Visual Decoding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust zero-shot capabilities across diverse vision-language tasks after training on mega-scale datasets. However, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and keypoint detection, pose significant challenges for MLLMs when represented solely as text outputs. Simultaneously, current MLLMs utilizing latent embeddings for visual task decoding generally demonstrate limited adaptability to both multi-task learning and multi-granularity scenarios. In this work, we present REF-VLM, an end-to-end framework for unified training of various visual decoding tasks. To address complex visual decoding scenarios, we introduce the Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm (TRP), which explicitly decouples three critical dimensions in visual decoding tasks through a triplet structure: concepts, decoding types, and targets. TRP employs symbolic delimiters to enforce structured representation learning, enhancing the parsability and interpretability of model outputs. Additionally, we construct Visual-Task Instruction Following Dataset (VTInstruct), a large-scale multi-task dataset containing over 100 million multimodal dialogue samples across 25 task types. Beyond text inputs and outputs, VT-Instruct incorporates various visual prompts such as point, box, scribble, and mask, and generates outputs composed of text and visual units like box, keypoint, depth and mask. The combination of different visual prompts and visual units generates a wide variety of task types, expanding the applicability of REF-VLM significantly. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our REF-VLM outperforms other MLLMs across a variety of standard benchmarks. The code, dataset, and demo available at https://github.com/MacavityT/REF-VLM.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 1

USCD: Improving Code Generation of LLMs by Uncertainty-Aware Selective Contrastive Decoding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, the effects of hallucinations (e.g., output noise) make it particularly challenging for LLMs to generate high-quality code in one pass. In this work, we propose a simple and effective uncertainty-aware selective contrastive decoding (USCD) mechanism to improve the quality of one-pass code generation in LLMs and reduce the impact of output noise. To be specific, we first elaborately designed a negative prompt (namely lame prompt) to output noise by removing input-output examples from the standard few-shot prompt. Our preliminary study shows that the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JS divergence) between token distribution uncertainty and the output noise is relatively low (approximately 0.25), indicating their high relevance. Then, we selectively eliminate output noise induced by lame prompts based on the uncertainty of the prediction distribution from the standard prompt. Notably, our proposed plug-and-play mechanism is an inference-only method, enjoying appealing flexibility. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks, e.g., HumanEval, MBPP, and MultiPL-E, upon several LLMs (i.e., Inocder-6b, CodeLlama-7b, WizardCoder-15b, StarCoder, and Llama2-7b), demonstrate that our proposed USCD significantly improves one-pass code generation, with an average pass@1 scores increase of 16.59\%. We will release code and data on GitHub.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 8, 2024

CodeT5+: Open Code Large Language Models for Code Understanding and Generation

Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on vast source code have achieved prominent progress in code intelligence. However, existing code LLMs have two main limitations in terms of architecture and pretraining tasks. First, they often adopt a specific architecture (encoder-only or decoder-only) or rely on a unified encoder-decoder network for different downstream tasks. The former paradigm is limited by inflexibility in applications while in the latter, the model is treated as a single system for all tasks, leading to suboptimal performance on a subset of tasks. Secondly, they often employ a limited set of pretraining objectives which might not be relevant to some downstream tasks and hence result in substantial performance degrade. To address these limitations, we propose ``CodeT5+'', a family of encoder-decoder LLMs for code in which component modules can be flexibly combined to suit a wide range of downstream code tasks. Such flexibility is enabled by our proposed mixture of pretraining objectives to mitigate the pretrain-finetune discrepancy. These objectives cover span denoising, contrastive learning, text-code matching, and causal LM pretraining tasks, on both unimodal and bimodal multilingual code corpora. Furthermore, we propose to initialize CodeT5+ with frozen off-the-shelf LLMs without training from scratch to efficiently scale up our models, and explore instruction-tuning to align with natural language instructions. We extensively evaluate CodeT5+ on over 20 code-related benchmarks in different settings, including zero-shot, finetuning, and instruction-tuning. We observe state-of-the-art (SoTA) model performance on various code-related tasks, such as code generation and completion, math programming, and text-to-code retrieval tasks. Particularly, our instruction-tuned CodeT5+ 16B achieves new SoTA results on HumanEval code generation task against other open code LLMs.

  • 6 authors
·
May 13, 2023 2

LaTCoder: Converting Webpage Design to Code with Layout-as-Thought

Converting webpage designs into code (design-to-code) plays a vital role in User Interface (UI) development for front-end developers, bridging the gap between visual design and functional implementation. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in design-to-code tasks, they often fail to accurately preserve the layout during code generation. To this end, we draw inspiration from the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in human cognition and propose LaTCoder, a novel approach that enhances layout preservation in webpage design during code generation with Layout-as-Thought (LaT). Specifically, we first introduce a simple yet efficient algorithm to divide the webpage design into image blocks. Next, we prompt MLLMs using a CoTbased approach to generate code for each block. Finally, we apply two assembly strategies-absolute positioning and an MLLM-based method-followed by dynamic selection to determine the optimal output. We evaluate the effectiveness of LaTCoder using multiple backbone MLLMs (i.e., DeepSeek-VL2, Gemini, and GPT-4o) on both a public benchmark and a newly introduced, more challenging benchmark (CC-HARD) that features complex layouts. The experimental results on automatic metrics demonstrate significant improvements. Specifically, TreeBLEU scores increased by 66.67% and MAE decreased by 38% when using DeepSeek-VL2, compared to direct prompting. Moreover, the human preference evaluation results indicate that annotators favor the webpages generated by LaTCoder in over 60% of cases, providing strong evidence of the effectiveness of our method.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025 2

Advancing vision-language models in front-end development via data synthesis

Modern front-end (FE) development, especially when leveraging the unique features of frameworks like React and Vue, presents distinctive challenges. These include managing modular architectures, ensuring synchronization between data and visual outputs for declarative rendering, and adapting reusable components to various scenarios. Such complexities make it particularly difficult for state-of-the-art large vision-language models (VLMs) to generate accurate and functional code directly from design images. To address these challenges, we propose a reflective agentic workflow that synthesizes high-quality image-text data to capture the diverse characteristics of FE development. This workflow automates the extraction of self-containedA \textbf{self-contained code snippet is one that encapsulates all necessary logic, styling, and dependencies, ensuring it functions independently without requiring external imports or context.} code snippets from real-world projects, renders the corresponding visual outputs, and generates detailed descriptions that link design elements to functional code. To further expand the scope and utility of the synthesis, we introduce three data synthesis strategies: Evolution-based synthesis, which enables scalable and diverse dataset expansion; Waterfall-Model-based synthesis, which generates logically coherent code derived from system requirements; and Additive Development synthesis, which iteratively increases the complexity of human-authored components. We build a large vision-language model, Flame, trained on the synthesized datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating React code via the pass@k metric. Our results suggest that a code VLM trained to interpret images before code generation may achieve better performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025

UCoder: Unsupervised Code Generation by Internal Probing of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation tasks. However, their effectiveness heavily relies on supervised training with extensive labeled (e.g., question-answering pairs) or unlabeled datasets (e.g., code snippets), which are often expensive and difficult to obtain at scale. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a method IPC, an unsupervised framework that leverages Internal Probing of LLMs for Code generation without any external corpus, even unlabeled code snippets. We introduce the problem space probing, test understanding probing, solution space probing, and knowledge consolidation and reinforcement to probe the internal knowledge and confidence patterns existing in LLMs. Further, IPC identifies reliable code candidates through self-consistency mechanisms and representation-based quality estimation to train UCoder (coder with unsupervised learning). We validate the proposed approach across multiple code benchmarks, demonstrating that unsupervised methods can achieve competitive performance compared to supervised approaches while significantly reducing the dependency on labeled data and computational resources. Analytic experiments reveal that internal model states contain rich signals about code quality and correctness, and that properly harnessing these signals enables effective unsupervised learning for code generation tasks, opening new directions for training code LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 19, 2025 2

SynthCoder: A Synthetical Strategy to Tune LLMs for Code Completion

Code completion is a prominent application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering. Due to the near real-time response requirements of this task, base models with small to medium-sized parameters are typically employed, supplemented by various optimization and post-training techniques. However, these optimization methods often have trade-offs, leading to a seesaw effect where performance improvements on certain datasets or metrics are accompanied by degradations on others -- sometimes even falling below the baseline model's performance. This paper proposes SynthCoder, a model that integrates leading industry practices to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) code completion task. In specific, we first construct a diverse dataset by combining Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) node extraction with heuristics that simulate developer behavior. Then we enrich our training corpus with cross-file contextual information using the BM25 algorithm and call graphs, enhancing the model's ability to perform code completion in both file-level and repository-level scenarios. As the last step, we employ a two-stage training process using the Seed-Coder-8B-Base as the base model. First, we fine-tune the model using Curriculum Learning technology. Following this, we perform alignment using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with preference pairs generated through Rejection Sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that our final model excels on mainstream repository-level code completion benchmarks, including aiXcoder, ExecRepoBench, CrossCodeEval, and CoLT. Furthermore, our carefully curated training set effectively mitigates the model's tendency to just repeat existing code, a common issue existing in various code completion models.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 21, 2025

OmniMamba: Efficient and Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation via State Space Models

Recent advancements in unified multimodal understanding and visual generation (or multimodal generation) models have been hindered by their quadratic computational complexity and dependence on large-scale training data. We present OmniMamba, the first linear-architecture-based multimodal generation model that generates both text and images through a unified next-token prediction paradigm. The model fully leverages Mamba-2's high computational and memory efficiency, extending its capabilities from text generation to multimodal generation. To address the data inefficiency of existing unified models, we propose two key innovations: (1) decoupled vocabularies to guide modality-specific generation, and (2) task-specific LoRA for parameter-efficient adaptation. Furthermore, we introduce a decoupled two-stage training strategy to mitigate data imbalance between two tasks. Equipped with these techniques, OmniMamba achieves competitive performance with JanusFlow while surpassing Show-o across benchmarks, despite being trained on merely 2M image-text pairs, which is 1,000 times fewer than Show-o. Notably, OmniMamba stands out with outstanding inference efficiency, achieving up to a 119.2 times speedup and 63% GPU memory reduction for long-sequence generation compared to Transformer-based counterparts. Code and models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/OmniMamba

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025 2

Enhancing High-Quality Code Generation in Large Language Models with Comparative Prefix-Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in commercial code completion engines, significantly enhancing coding efficiency and productivity. However, LLMs may generate code with quality issues that violate coding standards and best practices, such as poor code style and maintainability, even when the code is functionally correct. This necessitates additional effort from developers to improve the code, potentially negating the efficiency gains provided by LLMs. To address this problem, we propose a novel comparative prefix-tuning method for controllable high-quality code generation. Our method introduces a single, property-specific prefix that is prepended to the activations of the LLM, serving as a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning. Unlike existing methods that require training multiple prefixes, our approach trains only one prefix and leverages pairs of high-quality and low-quality code samples, introducing a sequence-level ranking loss to guide the model's training. This comparative approach enables the model to better understand the differences between high-quality and low-quality code, focusing on aspects that impact code quality. Additionally, we design a data construction pipeline to collect and annotate pairs of high-quality and low-quality code, facilitating effective training. Extensive experiments on the Code Llama 7B model demonstrate that our method improves code quality by over 100% in certain task categories, while maintaining functional correctness. We also conduct ablation studies and generalization experiments, confirming the effectiveness of our method's components and its strong generalization capability.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025

A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered remarkable advancements across diverse code-related tasks, known as Code LLMs, particularly in code generation that generates source code with LLM from natural language descriptions. This burgeoning field has captured significant interest from both academic researchers and industry professionals due to its practical significance in software development, e.g., GitHub Copilot. Despite the active exploration of LLMs for a variety of code tasks, either from the perspective of natural language processing (NLP) or software engineering (SE) or both, there is a noticeable absence of a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review dedicated to LLM for code generation. In this survey, we aim to bridge this gap by providing a systematic literature review that serves as a valuable reference for researchers investigating the cutting-edge progress in LLMs for code generation. We introduce a taxonomy to categorize and discuss the recent developments in LLMs for code generation, covering aspects such as data curation, latest advances, performance evaluation, and real-world applications. In addition, we present a historical overview of the evolution of LLMs for code generation and offer an empirical comparison using the widely recognized HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks to highlight the progressive enhancements in LLM capabilities for code generation. We identify critical challenges and promising opportunities regarding the gap between academia and practical development. Furthermore, we have established a dedicated resource website (https://codellm.github.io) to continuously document and disseminate the most recent advances in the field.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 1, 2024

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 5, 2025

StructCoder: Structure-Aware Transformer for Code Generation

There has been a recent surge of interest in automating software engineering tasks using deep learning. This paper addresses the problem of code generation, where the goal is to generate target code given source code in a different language or a natural language description. Most state-of-the-art deep learning models for code generation use training strategies primarily designed for natural language. However, understanding and generating code requires a more rigorous comprehension of the code syntax and semantics. With this motivation, we develop an encoder-decoder Transformer model where both the encoder and decoder are explicitly trained to recognize the syntax and data flow in the source and target codes, respectively. We not only make the encoder structure-aware by leveraging the source code's syntax tree and data flow graph, but we also support the decoder in preserving the syntax and data flow of the target code by introducing two novel auxiliary tasks: AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) paths prediction and data flow prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a structure-aware Transformer decoder that models both syntax and data flow to enhance the quality of generated code. The proposed StructCoder model achieves state-of-the-art performance on code translation and text-to-code generation tasks in the CodeXGLUE benchmark, and improves over baselines of similar size on the APPS code generation benchmark. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/reddy-lab-code-research/StructCoder/.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 10, 2022

EpiCoder: Encompassing Diversity and Complexity in Code Generation

Effective instruction tuning is indispensable for optimizing code LLMs, aligning model behavior with user expectations and enhancing model performance in real-world applications. However, most existing methods focus on code snippets, which are limited to specific functionalities and rigid structures, restricting the complexity and diversity of the synthesized data. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel feature tree-based synthesis framework inspired by Abstract Syntax Trees (AST). Unlike AST, which captures syntactic structure of code, our framework models semantic relationships between code elements, enabling the generation of more nuanced and diverse data. The feature tree is constructed from raw data and refined iteratively to increase the quantity and diversity of the extracted features. This process enables the identification of more complex patterns and relationships within the code. By sampling subtrees with controlled depth and breadth, our framework allows precise adjustments to the complexity of the generated code, supporting a wide range of tasks from simple function-level operations to intricate multi-file scenarios. We fine-tuned widely-used base models to create the EpiCoder series, achieving state-of-the-art performance at both the function and file levels across multiple benchmarks. Notably, empirical evidence indicates that our approach shows significant potential in synthesizing highly complex repository-level code data. Further analysis elucidates the merits of this approach by rigorously assessing data complexity and diversity through software engineering principles and LLM-as-a-judge method.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 8, 2025 2

Understanding and Harnessing Sparsity in Unified Multimodal Models

Large multimodal models have achieved remarkable progress in both understanding and generation. Recent efforts pursue unified multimodal models that integrate heterogeneous components to support both capabilities within a single framework. However, such unification introduces inference inefficiencies, e.g., specific tasks or samples may not require the full knowledge or capacity of the unified model. Yet, a systematic understanding of how these inefficiencies manifest across different components remains limited. In this work, we first conduct a systematic analysis of unified multimodal model components using training-free pruning as a probing methodology, considering both depth pruning and width reduction. Our study reveals that the understanding component exhibits notable compressibility in both understanding and generation tasks, which is more pronounced in the latter. In contrast, the generation components are highly sensitive to compression, with performance deteriorating sharply even under moderate compression ratios. To address this limitation, we propose the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Adaptation, inspired by the dynamic activation patterns observed across different samples. This approach partitions the generation module into multiple experts and enables sparse activation to restore generation quality. We validate the effectiveness of sparse activation through expert-frozen tuning and further demonstrate that a fully trainable adaptation delivers additional gains. As a result, the adapted BAGEL model achieves performance comparable to the full model while activating only about half of its parameters. The code is released at https://github.com/Shwai-He/SparseUnifiedModel{this link}.

LLM-Drop LLM-Drop
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Dec 1, 2025 2

CodeIF: Benchmarking the Instruction-Following Capabilities of Large Language Models for Code Generation

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the demand for robust instruction-following capabilities in code generation tasks has grown significantly. Code generation not only facilitates faster prototyping and automated testing, but also augments developer efficiency through improved maintainability and reusability of code. In this paper, we introduce CodeIF, the first benchmark specifically designed to assess the abilities of LLMs to adhere to task-oriented instructions within diverse code generation scenarios. CodeIF encompasses a broad range of tasks, including function synthesis, error debugging, algorithmic refactoring, and code explanation, thereby providing a comprehensive suite to evaluate model performance across varying complexity levels and programming domains. We conduct extensive experiments with LLMs, analyzing their strengths and limitations in meeting the demands of these tasks. The experimental results offer valuable insights into how well current models align with human instructions, as well as the extent to which they can generate consistent, maintainable, and contextually relevant code. Our findings not only underscore the critical role that instruction-following LLMs can play in modern software development, but also illuminate pathways for future research aimed at enhancing their adaptability, reliability, and overall effectiveness in automated code generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025

VisRefiner: Learning from Visual Differences for Screenshot-to-Code Generation

Screenshot-to-code generation aims to translate user interface screenshots into executable frontend code that faithfully reproduces the target layout and style. Existing multimodal large language models perform this mapping directly from screenshots but are trained without observing the visual outcomes of their generated code. In contrast, human developers iteratively render their implementation, compare it with the design, and learn how visual differences relate to code changes. Inspired by this process, we propose VisRefiner, a training framework that enables models to learn from visual differences between rendered predictions and reference designs. We construct difference-aligned supervision that associates visual discrepancies with corresponding code edits, allowing the model to understand how appearance variations arise from implementation changes. Building on this, we introduce a reinforcement learning stage for self-refinement, where the model improves its generated code by observing both the rendered output and the target design, identifying their visual differences, and updating the code accordingly. Experiments show that VisRefiner substantially improves single-step generation quality and layout fidelity, while also endowing models with strong self-refinement ability. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning from visual differences for advancing screenshot-to-code generation.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 5

Aligning Multimodal LLM with Human Preference: A Survey

Large language models (LLMs) can handle a wide variety of general tasks with simple prompts, without the need for task-specific training. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built upon LLMs, have demonstrated impressive potential in tackling complex tasks involving visual, auditory, and textual data. However, critical issues related to truthfulness, safety, o1-like reasoning, and alignment with human preference remain insufficiently addressed. This gap has spurred the emergence of various alignment algorithms, each targeting different application scenarios and optimization goals. Recent studies have shown that alignment algorithms are a powerful approach to resolving the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of alignment algorithms for MLLMs. Specifically, we explore four key aspects: (1) the application scenarios covered by alignment algorithms, including general image understanding, multi-image, video, and audio, and extended multimodal applications; (2) the core factors in constructing alignment datasets, including data sources, model responses, and preference annotations; (3) the benchmarks used to evaluate alignment algorithms; and (4) a discussion of potential future directions for the development of alignment algorithms. This work seeks to help researchers organize current advancements in the field and inspire better alignment methods. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models/tree/Alignment.

  • 17 authors
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Mar 18, 2025 3

LOCOFY Large Design Models -- Design to code conversion solution

Despite rapid advances in Large Language Models and Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous challenges related to interpretability, scalability, resource requirements and repeatability remain, related to their application in the design-to-code space. To address this, we introduce the Large Design Models (LDMs) paradigm specifically trained on designs and webpages to enable seamless conversion from design-to-code. We have developed a training and inference pipeline by incorporating data engineering and appropriate model architecture modification. The training pipeline consists of the following: 1)Design Optimiser: developed using a proprietary ground truth dataset and addresses sub-optimal designs; 2)Tagging and feature detection: using pre-trained and fine-tuned models, this enables the accurate detection and classification of UI elements; and 3)Auto Components: extracts repeated UI structures into reusable components to enable creation of modular code, thus reducing redundancy while enhancing code reusability. In this manner, each model addresses distinct but key issues for design-to-code conversion. Separately, our inference pipeline processes real-world designs to produce precise and interpretable instructions for code generation and ensures reliability. Additionally, our models illustrated exceptional end-to-end design-to-code conversion accuracy using a novel preview match score metric. Comparative experiments indicated superior performance of LDMs against LLMs on accuracy of node positioning, responsiveness and reproducibility. Moreover, our custom-trained tagging and feature detection model demonstrated high precision and consistency in identifying UI elements across a wide sample of test designs. Thus, our proposed LDMs are a reliable and superior solution to understanding designs that subsequently enable the generation of efficient and reliable production-ready code.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 21, 2025

InteractWeb-Bench: Can Multimodal Agent Escape Blind Execution in Interactive Website Generation?

With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and coding agents, the website development has shifted from manual programming to agent-based project-level code synthesis. Existing benchmarks rely on idealized assumptions, especially for well-structured, information-rich inputs and static execution settings. In contrast, real-world development is constrained by a critical bottleneck: the semantic misalignment between ambiguous, low-quality instructions from non-expert users and model understanding, which results in a failure mode that we term blind execution. To address this gap, we introduce InteractWeb-Bench, the first multimodal interactive benchmark for website generation under non-expert low-code user conditions. InteractWeb-Bench introduces four types of user agents and persona-driven instruction perturbations to systematically simulate diverse user behaviors, including ambiguity, redundancy, and contradiction, grounded in requirement engineering defect taxonomies. We develop an interactive execution environment for agents, featuring a unified action space comprising Clarify, Implement, Verify, and Submit, enabling iterative intent refinement, code synthesis, and visual feedback-based validation. Extensive experiments and analysis reveal that frontier MLLM-based agents remain trapped in blind execution, exposing limitations in intent recognition and adaptive interaction.

MoGIC: Boosting Motion Generation via Intention Understanding and Visual Context

Existing text-driven motion generation methods often treat synthesis as a bidirectional mapping between language and motion, but remain limited in capturing the causal logic of action execution and the human intentions that drive behavior. The absence of visual grounding further restricts precision and personalization, as language alone cannot specify fine-grained spatiotemporal details. We propose MoGIC, a unified framework that integrates intention modeling and visual priors into multimodal motion synthesis. By jointly optimizing multimodal-conditioned motion generation and intention prediction, MoGIC uncovers latent human goals, leverages visual priors to enhance generation, and exhibits versatile multimodal generative capability. We further introduce a mixture-of-attention mechanism with adaptive scope to enable effective local alignment between conditional tokens and motion subsequences. To support this paradigm, we curate Mo440H, a 440-hour benchmark from 21 high-quality motion datasets. Experiments show that after finetuning, MoGIC reduces FID by 38.6\% on HumanML3D and 34.6\% on Mo440H, surpasses LLM-based methods in motion captioning with a lightweight text head, and further enables intention prediction and vision-conditioned generation, advancing controllable motion synthesis and intention understanding. The code is available at https://github.com/JunyuShi02/MoGIC

  • 7 authors
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Oct 3, 2025

Cheers: Decoupling Patch Details from Semantic Representations Enables Unified Multimodal Comprehension and Generation

A recent cutting-edge topic in multimodal modeling is to unify visual comprehension and generation within a single model. However, the two tasks demand mismatched decoding regimes and visual representations, making it non-trivial to jointly optimize within a shared feature space. In this work, we present Cheers, a unified multimodal model that decouples patch-level details from semantic representations, thereby stabilizing semantics for multimodal understanding and improving fidelity for image generation via gated detail residuals. Cheers includes three key components: (i) a unified vision tokenizer that encodes and compresses image latent states into semantic tokens for efficient LLM conditioning, (ii) an LLM-based Transformer that unifies autoregressive decoding for text generation and diffusion decoding for image generation, and (iii) a cascaded flow matching head that decodes visual semantics first and then injects semantically gated detail residuals from the vision tokenizer to refine high-frequency content. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that Cheers matches or surpasses advanced UMMs in both visual understanding and generation. Cheers also achieves 4x token compression, enabling more efficient high-resolution image encoding and generation. Notably, Cheers outperforms the Tar-1.5B on the popular benchmarks GenEval and MMBench, while requiring only 20% of the training cost, indicating effective and efficient (i.e., 4x token compression) unified multimodal modeling. We will release all code and data for future research.

  • 22 authors
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Mar 13 3

CodeChain: Towards Modular Code Generation Through Chain of Self-revisions with Representative Sub-modules

Large Language Models (LLMs) have already become quite proficient at solving simpler programming tasks like those in HumanEval or MBPP benchmarks. However, solving more complex and competitive programming tasks is still quite challenging for these models - possibly due to their tendency to generate solutions as monolithic code blocks instead of decomposing them into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. On the other hand, experienced programmers instinctively write modularized code with abstraction for solving complex tasks, often reusing previously developed modules. To address this gap, we propose CodeChain, a novel framework for inference that elicits modularized code generation through a chain of self-revisions, each being guided by some representative sub-modules generated in previous iterations. Concretely, CodeChain first instructs the LLM to generate modularized codes through chain-of-thought prompting. Then it applies a chain of self-revisions by iterating the two steps: 1) extracting and clustering the generated sub-modules and selecting the cluster representatives as the more generic and re-usable implementations, and 2) augmenting the original chain-of-thought prompt with these selected module-implementations and instructing the LLM to re-generate new modularized solutions. We find that by naturally encouraging the LLM to reuse the previously developed and verified sub-modules, CodeChain can significantly boost both modularity as well as correctness of the generated solutions, achieving relative pass@1 improvements of 35% on APPS and 76% on CodeContests. It is shown to be effective on both OpenAI LLMs as well as open-sourced LLMs like WizardCoder. We also conduct comprehensive ablation studies with different methods of prompting, number of clusters, model sizes, program qualities, etc., to provide useful insights that underpin CodeChain's success.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 13, 2023 1

LLM as a Tool, Not an Agent: Code-Mined Tree Transformations for Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to automatically discover high-performing deep neural network (DNN) architectures. However, conventional algorithm-driven NAS relies on carefully hand-crafted search spaces to ensure executability, which restricts open-ended exploration. Recent coding-based agentic approaches using large language models (LLMs) reduce manual design, but current LLMs struggle to reliably generate complex, valid architectures, and their proposals are often biased toward a narrow set of patterns observed in their training data. To bridge reliable algorithmic search with powerful LLM assistance, we propose LLMasTool, a hierarchical tree-based NAS framework for stable and open-ended model evolution. Our method automatically extracts reusable modules from arbitrary source code and represents full architectures as hierarchical trees, enabling evolution through reliable tree transformations rather than code generation. At each evolution step, coarse-level planning is governed by a diversity-guided algorithm that leverages Bayesian modeling to improve exploration efficiency, while the LLM resolves the remaining degrees of freedom to ensure a meaningful evolutionary trajectory and an executable generated architecture. With this formulation, instead of fully agentic LLM approaches, our method explores diverse directions beyond the inherent biases in the LLM. Our method improves over existing NAS methods by 0.69, 1.83, and 2.68 points on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet16-120, demonstrating its effectiveness.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 16

One Model to Train them All: Hierarchical Self-Distillation for Enhanced Early Layer Embeddings

Deploying language models often requires handling model size vs. performance trade-offs to satisfy downstream latency constraints while preserving the model's usefulness. Model distillation is commonly employed to reduce model size while maintaining acceptable performance. However, distillation can be inefficient since it involves multiple training steps. In this work, we introduce MODULARSTARENCODER, a modular multi-exit encoder with 1B parameters, useful for multiple tasks within the scope of code retrieval. MODULARSTARENCODER is trained with a novel self-distillation mechanism that significantly improves lower-layer representations-allowing different portions of the model to be used while still maintaining a good trade-off in terms of performance. Our architecture focuses on enhancing text-to-code and code-to-code search by systematically capturing syntactic and semantic structures across multiple levels of representation. Specific encoder layers are targeted as exit heads, allowing higher layers to guide earlier layers during training. This self-distillation effect improves intermediate representations, increasing retrieval recall at no extra training cost. In addition to the multi-exit scheme, our approach integrates a repository-level contextual loss that maximally utilizes the training context window, further enhancing the learned representations. We also release a new dataset constructed via code translation, seamlessly expanding traditional text-to-code benchmarks with code-to-code pairs across diverse programming languages. Experimental results highlight the benefits of self-distillation through multi-exit supervision.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 4, 2025

Vibe Checker: Aligning Code Evaluation with Human Preference

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed vibe coding, where users leverage LLMs to generate and iteratively refine code through natural language interactions until it passes their vibe check. Vibe check is tied to real-world human preference and goes beyond functionality: the solution should feel right, read cleanly, preserve intent, and remain correct. However, current code evaluation remains anchored to pass@k and captures only functional correctness, overlooking the non-functional instructions that users routinely apply. In this paper, we hypothesize that instruction following is the missing piece underlying vibe check that represents human preference in coding besides functional correctness. To quantify models' code instruction following capabilities with measurable signals, we present VeriCode, a taxonomy of 30 verifiable code instructions together with corresponding deterministic verifiers. We use the taxonomy to augment established evaluation suites, resulting in Vibe Checker, a testbed to assess both code instruction following and functional correctness. Upon evaluating 31 leading LLMs, we show that even the strongest models struggle to comply with multiple instructions and exhibit clear functional regression. Most importantly, a composite score of functional correctness and instruction following correlates the best with human preference, with the latter emerging as the primary differentiator on real-world programming tasks. Our work identifies core factors of the vibe check, providing a concrete path for benchmarking and developing models that better align with user preferences in coding.

deepmind Deepmind
·
Oct 8, 2025 2

Sketch-in-Latents: Eliciting Unified Reasoning in MLLMs

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at visual understanding tasks through text reasoning, they often fall short in scenarios requiring visual imagination. Unlike current works that take predefined external toolkits or generate images during thinking, however, humans can form flexible visual-text imagination and interactions during thinking without predefined toolkits, where one important reason is that humans construct the visual-text thinking process in a unified space inside the brain. Inspired by this capability, given that current MLLMs already encode visual and text information in the same feature space, we hold that visual tokens can be seamlessly inserted into the reasoning process carried by text tokens, where ideally, all visual imagination processes can be encoded by the latent features. To achieve this goal, we propose Sketch-in-Latents (SkiLa), a novel paradigm for unified multi-modal reasoning that expands the auto-regressive capabilities of MLLMs to natively generate continuous visual embeddings, termed latent sketch tokens, as visual thoughts. During multi-step reasoning, the model dynamically alternates between textual thinking mode for generating textual think tokens and visual sketching mode for generating latent sketch tokens. A latent visual semantics reconstruction mechanism is proposed to ensure these latent sketch tokens are semantically grounded. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkiLa achieves superior performance on vision-centric tasks while exhibiting strong generalization to diverse general multi-modal benchmarks. Codes will be released at https://github.com/TungChintao/SkiLa.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 18, 2025