Co-Evolving Policy and Reward for Code Generation: A Mechanistic Study of Single-Adapter Drift

Amarsaikhan Batjargal, Noriko Tomuro

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is particularly well suited to code generation because generated programs can be objectively evaluated through execution. Execution also provides behavioral information that can be reused as additional supervision. The Synergistic Policy and Reward Co-Evolving Framework (SPARK), originally proposed for reasoning tasks, exploits this idea by recycling training rollouts and their evaluation results to train a model not only to generate solutions but also to evaluate and improve them. We investigate whether this policy-reward co-evolution approach transfers effectively to code generation and whether execution-grounded reflection provides an additional source of self-improvement. We compare SPARK-style rollout recycling with execution-only Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using Qwen2.5-Coder-3B-Instruct. Our results do not support either hypothesis under the configuration tested. Although co-evolution improves training performance, these gains do not generalize to held-out problems. Compared at the same stage of training, rollout recycling produces roughly 34x greater KL divergence from the reference policy than…