CoReQA: Uncovering Potentials of Language Models in Code Repository Question Answering (Jan 2025, arXiv)
- Paper: CoReQA: Uncovering Potentials of Language Models in Code Repository Question Answering
- Authors: Jialiang Chen, Kaifa Zhao, Jie Liu, Chao Peng, Jierui Liu, Hang Zhu, et al. (9 authors total)
- Published: January 2025
- Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03447
- Type: Academic paper
- Topics: Question Answering, Search Engine Evaluation, Information Retrieval
- The paper proposes a benchmark/evaluation protocol for code repository question answering with LLMs.
- It relates to broader trends in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search, where retrieval steps and tool use become part of the model's decision space.
- Relevant methodological components discussed in this research area include dense/sparse retrieval representations, rerankers, planners, and generation with feedback mechanisms.
- Typical evaluation considerations include Recall@k, task success rate, latency, and token cost, with baselines such as BM25, dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and retrieval-free LLMs.
- Open challenges highlighted in this space include benchmark fidelity to real user distributions, hallucination, latency and cost constraints, and cross-lingual generalization.
- Researchers: Reproduce core comparisons and check whether statistical significance and compute costs are reported.
- Engineers: Assess how repository-level QA modules could plug into existing code search and developer-assistant stacks.
- Product managers: Focus on user-perceivable benefits such as answer trustworthiness and multi-turn consistency rather than offline metrics alone.
Overview
CoReQA is a January 2025 arXiv paper (arXiv:2501.03447) that studies how well large language models perform question answering over code repositories. Repository-level QA is a demanding task: unlike isolated function-level code completion, it requires models to reason about repository structure, cross-file dependencies, and the developer's intent behind a natural-language question.
Context and Motivation
The work is situated at the intersection of information retrieval and code intelligence. Traditional pipeline approaches that separate retrieval, ranking, and generation struggle to meet modern requirements for natural-language interaction, multi-hop reasoning, and up-to-date knowledge. CoReQA aims to systematically probe the theoretical and practical boundaries of LLMs in this setting, and to provide a comparable framework for evaluating repository question answering.
Key Points (based on available metadata)
Caveats
This post is based on the paper's abstract and public metadata. Exact benchmark composition, dataset sources, and quantitative results are not reproduced here — readers citing numerical findings should verify against the original PDF at https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03447.