SpecCoder: Specification-Aware Code Generation with Curriculum Dual-Task Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in code generation but still struggle with challenging programming tasks that require understanding rich natural language requirements. These requirements often specify problem goals, input/output formats, constraints, examples, and edge cases. Overlooking even one may produce executable but functionally incorrect code. Existing training-free methods mainly rely on prompting or agent-based workflows, while training-based methods typically optimize final code outputs. However, existing approaches provide limited supervision for learning the intermediate mapping from raw requirements to structured specifications and for grounding them in concrete implementation behavior. Consequently, models may omit critical constraints, and even when an explicit specification is produced, the implementation may fail to reflect it consistently. Motivated by this gap, we propose SpecCoder, a specification-aware two-stage training framework for code generation. SpecCoder first employs specification-guided SFT to train LLMs to derive structured specification analyses and generate code conditioned on them. It then introduces curriculum dual-task GRPO, which jointly optimizes specification-guided generation and discrimination to encourage stronger correspondence between specifications and code behavior. Experiments on APPS, CodeContests, and xCodeEval demonstrate the effectiveness of specification-aware training, with SpecCoder consistently improving both standalone code generation and agent-based workflows. Additional evaluations on BigCodeBench-Hard and ClassEval, alongside human evaluation and perturbation studies, further validate the role of structured specifications in guiding code generation and discrimination.