Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: LLMs demonstrate surface-level fluency in code generation but struggle with structured reasoning tasks requiring correctness and semantic alignment. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning through intermediate steps, it suffers from verbosity and inefficiency. Chain-of-Draft (CoD) prompting offers more concise reasoning, but the stochastic nature of LLMs produces varying solution quality, making optimal selection challenging. We propose \multicod, a reinforcement learning framework that learns to select the most promising candidate from CoD-generated solutions. Our approach uses strategy-guided prompting to encourage diverse reasoning styles and models solution selection as a contextual bandit problem. The framework optimizes interpretable features including code complexity, reasoning structure, and strategic metadata through a reward function balancing correctness, efficiency, and clarity. Experiments on MBPP, BigCodeBench, SWE-bench Verified, and Defects4J show \multicod~outperforms and in some cases, on par with standard prompting, CoT, and CoD baselines while achieving cost and token efficiency from the user's perspective through a multi-candidate design that charges only for the selected output, reducing user billing by over 50\% and improving LLM response quality, making \multicod~more sustainable and scalable for real-world deployment. Our code is available: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MultiCoD.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Tang, Xunzhu, Olatunji, Iyiola Emmanuel, Sun, Tiezhu, Klein, Jacques, Bissyande, Tegawende F.
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7084626293
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