Beyond Repository Boundaries: Cross-Repository Graph Retrieval for Code Generation
TL;DR
CrossCoder is proposed, a cross-repository code generation framework that explicitly incorporates external libraries into the retrieval context through a unified knowledge graph over repository and library entities that consistently improves both functional correctness and robustness to dependency-version changes.
Abstract
Repository-level code generation requires generated code to be compatible not only with the target repository but also with its dependency environment. Existing retrieval-based methods mainly retrieve context from the local repository, leaving external API usage dependent on the model's pretrained knowledge, which can be insufficient for unseen or version-specific APIs. Moreover, current retrieval strategies largely focus on one-hop evidence and overlook the structural relationships among code components. We propose CrossCoder, a cross-repository code generation framework that explicitly incorporates external libraries into the retrieval context through a unified knowledge graph over repository and library entities. CrossCoder identifies important nodes via planning and semantic retrieval, then selectively expands neighboring nodes to retrieve richer multi-hop contextual evidence for generation. To further evaluate dependency-version compatibility, we introduce VersionExec, an execution-based benchmark derived from BigCodeBench that evaluates generation under different dependency versions. Experimental results on RepoExec, DevEval, and VersionExec demonstrate that CrossCoder consistently improves both functional correctness (up to 6.3% on pass@1) and robustness to dependency-version changes.