When Do Intrinsic Rewards Work for Code Reasoning? A Comprehensive Study
Researchers conducted a systematic empirical study of intrinsic reward methods for code generation using reinforcement learning, finding that certainty-based approaches achieve early gains but inevitably collapse as models progressively shorten outputs and lose reasoning capability. The study reveals that pre-training with intrinsic rewards offers no significant improvement over training from scratch, challenging the transferability of these methods from mathematical reasoning to code generation tasks.