In plain words: A new test checks coding skills by feeding models huge real-world codebases and asking questions or bug fixes drawn from real GitHub issues. Every model struggled as context grew, with Claude 3.5 Sonnet falling from 29% to 3%.
Abstract
Context lengths for models have grown rapidly, from thousands to millions of tokens in just a few years. The extreme context sizes of modern long-context models have made it difficult to construct realistic long-context benchmarks -- not only due to the cost of collecting million-context tasks but also in identifying realistic scenarios that require significant contexts. We identify code comprehension and repair as a natural testbed and challenge task for long-context models and introduce LongCodeBench (LCB), a benchmark to test LLM coding abilities in long-context scenarios. Our benchmark tests both the comprehension and repair capabilities of LCLMs in realistic and important settings by drawing from real-world GitHub issues and constructing QA (LongCodeQA) and bug fixing (LongSWE-Bench) tasks. We carefully stratify the complexity of our benchmark, enabling us to evaluate models across different scales -- ranging from Qwen2.5 14B Instruct to Google's flagship Gemini model. We find that long-context remains a weakness for all models, with performance drops such as from 29% to 3% for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or from 70.2% to 40% for Qwen2.5. The LCB dataset is available publicly at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Steefano/LCB and the codebase to replicate the work on this paper at https://github.com/Zteefano/long-code-bench.
Stefano Rando, Luca Romani, Alessio Sampieri, Luca Franco, John Yang, Yuta Kyuragi, Fabio Galasso, Tatsunori Hashimoto
arXiv:2505.07897 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted May 12, 2025 · updated Oct 22, 2025
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