EvoCodeBench: An Evolving Code Generation Benchmark with Domain-Specific Evaluations

Jia Li, Ge Li, Xuanming Zhang, Yunfei Zhao, Yihong Dong, Zhi Jin, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li

Keywords: Code Generation Benchmark, Large Language Models

Abstract:

How to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation remains an open question.
Many benchmarks have been proposed, but they have two limitations, i.e., data leakage and lack of domain-specific evaluation.
The former hurts the fairness of benchmarks, and the latter hinders practitioners from selecting superior LLMs for specific programming domains.

To address these two limitations, we propose a new benchmark - EvoCodeBench, which has the following advances:
(1) Evolving data. EvoCodeBench will be dynamically updated every period (e.g., 6 months) to avoid data leakage. This paper releases the first version - EvoCodeBench-2403, containing 275 samples from 25 repositories.
(2) A domain taxonomy and domain labels. Based on the statistics of open-source communities, we design a programming domain taxonomy consisting of 10 popular domains. Based on the taxonomy, we annotate each sample in EvoCodeBench with a domain label. EvoCodeBench provides a broad platform for domain-specific evaluations.
(3) Domain-specific evaluations. Besides the Pass@k, we compute the Domain-Specific Improvement (DSI) and define LLMs' comfort and strange domains. These evaluations help practitioners select superior LLMs in specific domains and discover the shortcomings of existing LLMs.
Besides, EvoCodeBench is collected by a rigorous pipeline and aligns with real-world repositories in multiple aspects (e.g., code distributions).
We evaluate 8 popular LLMs (e.g., gpt-4, DeepSeek Coder, StarCoder 2) on EvoCodeBench and summarize some insights. EvoCodeBench reveals the actual abilities of these LLMs in real-world repositories. For example, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4 on EvoCodeBench-2403 is only 20.74%. Besides, we evaluate LLMs in different domains and discover their comfort and strange domains. For example, gpt-4 performs best in most domains but falls behind others in the Internet domain. StarCoder 2-15B unexpectedly performs well in the Database domain and even outperforms 33B LLMs. We release EvoCodeBench, all prompts, and LLMs' completions for further community analysis.

Flagged For Ethics Review: true

Submission Number: 1533