Enhancing queries for code generation with reinforcement learning
We present a reinforcement learning framework that enhances natural language queries to improve DeepSeek code generation. A parametric refiner (Qwen with LoRA) is trained via REINFORCE while the generator remains fixed, using a scalar reward that can combine text similarity (BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, F1, Overlap) with execution signals (unit tests, syntax/timeout penalties). On the DS1000 benchmark (800 train / 200 test), RL4QE improves the code similarity by 34.3%. Ablations show that BLEU-4 is the most reliable text reward overall (with F1 competitive on a larger scale), and LoRA with rank [Formula: see text] outperforms complete fine-tuning on most metrics while being more parameter efficient. The approach is transferred across foundation models (e.g., Qwen1.5/2/2.5 variants), where architecture often matters more than size. RL4QE is easy to integrate in practice (LoRA in attention projections) and supports reproducibility.
Authors
- Dawei Yuan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3283-7775)
- Suping Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3274-6870)
- Gau Rong Liang
- Tingting Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5651-5260)
Institutions
- Halmstad University (SE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2025-10-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-21271-4
- Primary Topic
- Topic Modeling
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00