mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Code Aesthetics with Agentic Reward Feedback

arXiv 2510.23272 ↗First posted 27 Oct 2025cs.CLcited by 6

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become valuable assistants for developers in code-related tasks. While LLMs excel at traditional programming tasks such as code generation and bug fixing, they struggle with visually-oriented coding tasks, often producing suboptimal aesthetics. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline to enhance the aesthetic quality of LLM-generated code. We first construct AesCode-358K, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset focused on code aesthetics. Next, we propose agentic reward feedback, a multi-agent system that evaluates executability, static aesthetics, and interactive aesthetics. Building on this, we develop GRPO-AR, which integrates these signals into the GRPO algorithm for joint optimization of functionality and code aesthetics. Finally, we develop OpenDesign, a benchmark for assessing code aesthetics. Experimental results show that combining supervised fine-tuning on AesCode-358K with reinforcement learning using agentic reward feedback significantly improves performance on OpenDesign and also enhances results on existing benchmarks such as PandasPlotBench. Notably, our AesCoder-4B surpasses GPT-4o and GPT-4.1, and achieves performance comparable to large open-source models with 480B-685B parameters, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 33 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2025.

Builds on

33 of 48 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?17 Mar

Other references · 32

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  4. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  5. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  6. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  7. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  8. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,912
  9. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
  10. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  11. 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,464
  12. 2024Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Reportcited by 1,203
20 more
  1. 2024ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Toolscited by 1,121
  2. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 438
  3. 2023Scaling Relationship on Learning Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 427
  4. 2024Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Expertscited by 376
  5. 2022CodeRL: Mastering Code Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 358
  6. 2025Logic-RL: Unleashing LLM Reasoning with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learningcited by 262
  7. 2024MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialoguescited by 250
  8. 2024RLEF: Grounding Code LLMs in Execution Feedback with Reinforcement Learningcited by 151
  9. 2024Unlocking the conversion of Web Screenshots into HTML Code with the WebSight Datasetcited by 129
  10. 2024Rule Based Rewards for Language Model Safetycited by 108
  11. 2023PanGu-Coder2: Boosting Large Language Models for Code with Ranking Feedbackcited by 69
  12. 2023AI-Generated Content (AIGC): A Surveycited by 59
  13. 2025Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systemscited by 51
  14. 2016Image Aesthetic Assessment: An Experimental Surveycited by 50
  15. 2024Drawing Pandas: A Benchmark for LLMs in Generating Plotting Codecited by 23
  16. 2025HumanAesExpert: Advancing a Multi-Modality Foundation Model for Human Image Aesthetic Assessmentcited by 19
  17. 2025VisCoder: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Executable Python Visualization Code Generationcited by 17
  18. 2024Multimodal Large Language Model is a Human-Aligned Annotator for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 15
  19. 2024Aligning Vision Models with Human Aesthetics in Retrieval: Benchmarks and Algorithmscited by 3
  20. 2024Textual Aesthetics in Large Language Modelscited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026AesCode: Aesthetic Code Generation with Decoupled Cross-Modal Rewards
  2. 2026SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks
  3. 2025KAT-Coder Technical Report
  4. 2026MaxCode: A Max-Reward Reinforcement Learning Framework for Automated Code Optimization
  5. 2026Self-Distillation Policy Optimization via Visual Feedback: Bridging Code and Visual Artifacts
  6. 2026WebGen-R1: Incentivizing Large Language Models to Generate Functional and Aesthetic Websites with Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025ReLook: Vision-Grounded RL with a Multimodal LLM Critic for Agentic Web Coding
  8. 2026CodeMidas: Scaling Agentic Coding RL Environments from Code Itself