@inproceedings{yang-etal-2025-codearena,
    title = "{C}ode{A}rena: Evaluating and Aligning {C}ode{LLM}s on Human Preference",
    author = "Yang, Jian  and
      Yang, Jiaxi  and
      Zhang, Wei  and
      Ke, Jin  and
      Miao, Yibo  and
      Zhang, Lei  and
      Yang, Liqun  and
      Cui, Zeyu  and
      Zhang, Yichang  and
      Li, Zhoujun  and
      Hui, Binyuan  and
      Lin, Junyang",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.489/",
    pages = "9683--9694",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "We present CodeArena to emulate the complexity/diversity of real-world coding tasks, spanning 40 categories and 44 PLs. A 20B diverse synthetic instruction corpus is created by scaling instructions to help Qwen2.5-SynCoder achieve SOTA performance. Abstract: Code large language models (codeLLMs) have made significant strides in code generation. Most previous code-related benchmarks, which consist of various programming exercises along with the corresponding test cases, are used as a common measure to evaluate the performance and capabilities of code LLMs. However, the current code LLMs focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences, where the query should be sampled from the practical application scenarios and the model-generated responses should satisfy the human preference. To bridge the gap between the model-generated response and human preference, we present a rigorous human-curated benchmark CodeArena to emulate the complexity and diversity of real-world coding tasks, where 397 high-quality samples spanning 40 categories and 44 programming languages, carefully curated from user queries. Further, we propose a diverse synthetic instruction corpus SynCode-Instruct (nearly 20B tokens) by scaling instructions from the website to verify the effectiveness of the large-scale synthetic instruction fine-tuning, where Qwen2.5-SynCoder totally trained on synthetic instruction data can achieve top-tier performance of open-source code LLMs. The results find performance differences between execution-based benchmarks and CodeArena. Our systematic experiments of CodeArena on 40+ LLMs reveal a notable performance gap between open SOTA code LLMs (e.g. Qwen2.5-Coder) and proprietary LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1), underscoring the importance of the human preference alignment."
}