{"id":1180663,"date":"2026-08-03T08:09:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/x-coder-advancing-competitive-programming-with-fully-synthetic-tasks-solutions-and-tests\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T16:51:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T23:51:08","slug":"x-coder-advancing-competitive-programming-with-fully-synthetic-tasks-solutions-and-tests","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/x-coder-advancing-competitive-programming-with-fully-synthetic-tasks-solutions-and-tests\/","title":{"rendered":"X-Coder: Advancing Competitive Programming with Fully Synthetic Tasks, Solutions, and Tests"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Competitive programming poses a significant challenge for Code LLMs. While recent models have shown promise, they heavily rely on finite real-world data, raising concerns about scalability and contamination. In this paper, we investigate a critical question: Can we elevate models to expert-level reasoning performance using fully synthetic data? In response, we first observe that off-the-shelf synthesis methods yield suboptimal results in this domain. To address this, we systematically investigate the key factors governing synthetic data quality. Leveraging these findings, we significantly advance the feature-based synthesis paradigm via domain-specific evolution and a dual-verification strategy, promoting task solvability, solution correctness, and test accuracy. Using this high-quality synthetic data, we train the X-Coder model series under an SFT-then-RL paradigm. X-Coder-7B shows significant performance gains on the challenging LiveCodeBench v5 (62.9% avg@8) and v6 (55.8% avg@8), outperforming larger models trained on real-world data. Extensive analysis distills valuable insights into synthetic data scaling, the necessity of domain-adapted feature evolution, and code-centric reinforcement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Competitive programming poses a significant challenge for Code LLMs. While recent models have shown promise, they heavily rely on finite real-world data, raising concerns about scalability and contamination. In this paper, we investigate a critical question: Can we elevate models to expert-level reasoning performance using fully synthetic data? In response, we first observe that off-the-shelf [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Jie Wu","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Haoling Li","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Xin Zhang","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Jiani Guo","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Jane Luo","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Steven Liu","user_id":0},{"type":"edited_text","value":"Yangyu Huang","user_id":"41488"},{"type":"text","value":"Ruihang Chu","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Scarlett Li","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Yujiu 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