Xue Jiang, Ge Li, Jiaru Qian, Xianjie Shi, Chenjie Li, Hao Zhu, Ziyu Wang, Jielun Zhang, Zeyu Zhao, Kechi Zhang, Jia Li, Wenpin Jiao, Zhi Jin, Yihong Dong. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in repository-level code completion, which completes code based on the in-file and cross-file context of a repository. The cross-file context typically contains different types of information (e.g., relevant APIs and similar code) and is lengthy. In this paper, we found that LLMs struggle to fully utilize the information in the cross-file context. We hypothesize that one of the root causes of the limitation is the misalignment between pre-training (i.e., relying on nearby context) and repo-level code completion (i.e., frequently attending to long-range cross-file context).To address the above misalignment, we propose Code Long-context Alignment - CoLA, a purely data-driven approach to explicitly teach LLMs to focus on the cross-file context. Specifically, CoLA constructs a large-scale repo-level code completion dataset - CoLA-132K, where each sample contains the long cross-file context (up to 128K tokens) and requires generating context-aware code (i.e., cross-file API invocations and code spans similar to cross-file context). Through a two-stage training pipeline upon CoLA-132K, LLMs learn the capability of finding relevant information in the cross-file context, thus aligning LLMs with repo-level code completion. We apply CoLA to multiple popular LLMs (e.g., aiXcoder-7B) and extensive experiments on CoLA-132K and a public benchmark - CrossCodeEval. Our experiments yield the following results. ❶ Effectiveness. CoLA substantially improves the performance of multiple LLMs in repo-level code completion. For example, it improves aiXcoder-7B by up to 19.7% in exact match. ❷ Generalizability. The capability learned by CoLA can generalize to new languages (i.e., languages not in training data). ❸ Enhanced Context Utilization Capability. We design two probing experiments, which show CoLA improves the capability of LLMs in utilizing the information (i.e., relevant APIs and similar code) in cross-file context. Our datasets and model weights are released in [1].

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automated code generation but typically excel only in simpler tasks such as generating standalone code units.However, real-world software development often involves complex code repositories with complex dependencies and extensive documentation.To enable LLMs to handle these realworld repo-level code generation, we present CODEAGENT, a novel LLM-based agent framework that employs external tools for effective repo-level code generation.CODEAGENT integrates five programming tools, enabling interaction with software artifacts for information retrieval, code implementation, and code testing.We implement four agent strategies to optimize these tools' usage.To the best of our knowledge, CODEAGENT is the first agent framework specifically for repolevel code generation.In order to measure the effectiveness of our method at the repository level, we design a repo-level benchmark CODEAGENTBENCH.The performance on this benchmark shows a significant improvement brought by our method, with improvements in pass rate ranging from 2.0 to 15.8.Further tests on the HumanEval benchmark confirm CODEAGENT's adaptability and efficacy across various code generation tasks.Notably, CODEAGENT outperforms commercial products like GitHub Copilot, showcasing superior accuracy and efficiency.These results demonstrate CODEAGENT's robust capabilities in code generation, highlighting its potential for real-world repo-level coding challenges.