English

RANGER -- Repository-Level Agent for Graph-Enhanced Retrieval

Software Engineering 2025-10-01 v1 Information Retrieval Machine Learning

Abstract

General-purpose automated software engineering (ASE) includes tasks such as code completion, retrieval, repair, QA, and summarization. These tasks require a code retrieval system that can handle specific queries about code entities, or code entity queries (for example, locating a specific class or retrieving the dependencies of a function), as well as general queries without explicit code entities, or natural language queries (for example, describing a task and retrieving the corresponding code). We present RANGER, a repository-level code retrieval agent designed to address both query types, filling a gap in recent works that have focused primarily on code-entity queries. We first present a tool that constructs a comprehensive knowledge graph of the entire repository, capturing hierarchical and cross-file dependencies down to the variable level, and augments graph nodes with textual descriptions and embeddings to bridge the gap between code and natural language. RANGER then operates on this graph through a dual-stage retrieval pipeline. Entity-based queries are answered through fast Cypher lookups, while natural language queries are handled by MCTS-guided graph exploration. We evaluate RANGER across four diverse benchmarks that represent core ASE tasks including code search, question answering, cross-file dependency retrieval, and repository-level code completion. On CodeSearchNet and RepoQA it outperforms retrieval baselines that use embeddings from strong models such as Qwen3-8B. On RepoBench, it achieves superior cross-file dependency retrieval over baselines, and on CrossCodeEval, pairing RANGER with BM25 delivers the highest exact match rate in code completion compared to other RAG methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.25257,
  title  = {RANGER -- Repository-Level Agent for Graph-Enhanced Retrieval},
  author = {Pratik Shah and Rajat Ghosh and Aryan Singhal and Debojyoti Dutta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25257},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:05:40.712Z