English

DependEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Repository Dependency Understanding

Software Engineering 2025-03-11 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

While large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable promise in code generation, real-world software development demands advanced repository-level reasoning. This includes understanding dependencies, project structures, and managing multi-file changes. However, the ability of LLMs to effectively comprehend and handle complex code repositories has yet to be fully explored. To address challenges, we introduce a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate repository dependency understanding (DependEval). Benchmark is based on 15,576 repositories collected from real-world websites. It evaluates models on three core tasks: Dependency Recognition, Repository Construction, and Multi-file Editing, across 8 programming languages from actual code repositories. Our evaluation of over 25 LLMs reveals substantial performance gaps and provides valuable insights into repository-level code understanding.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.06689,
  title  = {DependEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Repository Dependency Understanding},
  author = {Junjia Du and Yadi Liu and Hongcheng Guo and Jiawei Wang and Haojian Huang and Yunyi Ni and Zhoujun Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06689},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:13:00.948Z