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arXiv · 2603.16158

Execution-Grounded Credit Assignment for GRPO in Code Generation

Abhijit Kumar·Natalya Kumar·Shikhar Gupta
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Abstract

Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves code generation by optimizing unit-test pass rates, but GRPO-style updates suffer from coarse credit assignment: a single outcome signal is spread uniformly across long programs even when failure stems from a localized semantic error. We propose Execution-Grounded Credit Assignment (EGCA), which localizes GRPO updates using execution traces. For programs that satisfy algorithmic constraints but fail tests, EGCA executes the candidate and a canonical reference solution (curated once offline; used for analysis, not supervision) under identical instrumentation, identifies the earliest semantic divergence, and assigns advantage only to the corresponding token span while masking downstream tokens. EGCA is a drop-in modification requiring no critic, auxiliary loss, or learned verifier, yielding 82.1% pass@1 on HumanEval (+3.1 over GRPO) and 68.9% on MBPP (+1.5) with 18% wall-clock overhead.

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Abhijit Kumar, Natalya Kumar, Shikhar Gupta. 2026-03-17. Execution-Grounded Credit Assignment for GRPO in Code Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16158

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