{"id":1161631,"date":"2026-02-06T14:55:05","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T22:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1161631"},"modified":"2026-02-06T14:55:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T22:55:05","slug":"aescoder-code-aesthetics-with-agentic-reward-feedback","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/aescoder-code-aesthetics-with-agentic-reward-feedback\/","title":{"rendered":"AESCoder: Code Aesthetics with Agentic Reward Feedback"},"content":{"rendered":"
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. 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