# From Token to Line: Enhancing Code Generation with a Long-Term Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07433 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07433/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00859/) (2021)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04406/) (2023)
- [InCoder: A Generative Model for Code Infilling and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05999/) (2022)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [CodeGeeX: A Pre-Trained Model for Code Generation with Multilingual Benchmarking on HumanEval-X](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17568/) (2023)
- [CodeNet: A Large-Scale AI for Code Dataset for Learning a Diversity of Coding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12655/) (2021)
- [Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05510/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Analogical Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01714/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17558/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Dynamic VQA Dataset and Self-adaptive Planning Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02937/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Optimizing Prompt Sequences using Monte Carlo Tree Search for LLM-Based Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05995/) (2025)
- [AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04550/) (2025)
- [SemantiCache: Efficient KV Cache Compression via Semantic Chunking and Clustered Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14303/) (2026)
- [RPM-MCTS: Knowledge-Retrieval as Process Reward Model with Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19895/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly promoted the development of code generation task, sparking a surge in pertinent literature. Current research is hindered by redundant generation results and a tendency to overfit local patterns in the short term. Although existing studies attempt to alleviate the issue by adopting a multi-token prediction strategy, there remains limited focus on choosing the appropriate processing length for generations. By analyzing the attention between tokens during the generation process of LLMs, it can be observed that the high spikes of the attention scores typically appear at the end of lines. This insight suggests that it is reasonable to treat each line of code as a fundamental processing unit and generate them sequentially. Inspired by this, we propose the LSR-MCTS algorithm, which leverages MCTS to determine the code line-by-line and select the optimal path. Further, we integrate a self-refine mechanism at each node to enhance diversity and generate higher-quality programs through error correction. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analyses on three public coding benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance approaches.