English

On the Impacts of Contexts on Repository-Level Code Generation

Software Engineering 2025-02-11 v4 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

CodeLLMs have gained widespread adoption for code generation tasks, yet their capacity to handle repository-level code generation with complex contextual dependencies remains underexplored. Our work underscores the critical importance of leveraging repository-level contexts to generate executable and functionally correct code. We present RepoExec, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate repository-level code generation, with a focus on three key aspects: executability, functional correctness through comprehensive test case generation, and accurate utilization of cross-file contexts. Our study examines a controlled scenario where developers specify essential code dependencies (contexts), challenging models to integrate them effectively. Additionally, we introduce an instruction-tuned dataset that enhances CodeLLMs' ability to leverage dependencies, along with a new metric, Dependency Invocation Rate (DIR), to quantify context utilization. Experimental results reveal that while pretrained LLMs demonstrate superior performance in terms of correctness, instruction-tuned models excel in context utilization and debugging capabilities. RepoExec offers a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing code functionality and alignment with developer intent, thereby advancing the development of more reliable CodeLLMs for real-world applications. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/RepoExec.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.11927,
  title  = {On the Impacts of Contexts on Repository-Level Code Generation},
  author = {Nam Le Hai and Dung Manh Nguyen and Nghi D. Q. Bui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.11927},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to NAACL 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:09:16.176Z